"Developed Lotto Winning Program" 40s Man Sentenced to Prison for Embezzling Hundreds of Millions

Embezzlement of 238 Million KRW Over 19 Instances
Court Sentences 1 Year Imprisonment for Fraud Charges

A man in his 40s who deceived others by claiming to have developed a Lotto lottery number combination program and extorted hundreds of millions of won under the pretext of investment was sentenced to prison.

According to the legal community on the 1st, Judge Park Sook-hee of the Daejeon District Court Criminal Division 7 sentenced Mr. A (40), who was tried on charges of fraud, to one year in prison. Mr. A built a relationship with Mr. B (32), who contacted him after seeing a photo of a foreign car posted on social networking service (SNS) around December 17, 2019, by consulting on the purchase of the foreign car.

After establishing some rapport with Mr. B, Mr. A showed a box containing receipts for Lotto lottery first and second prize winnings, saying, "These numbers were combined to win the Lotto lottery," and encouraged investment by claiming, "I bought an apartment and a foreign car with the money earned this way."

Mr. A claimed that he developed a program capable of generating number combinations with a high chance of winning through a Lotto analysis site he operated, and that by receiving investments to purchase a large number of lottery tickets and sharing the winnings proportionally to the investment amount, one could make a large profit.

Lotto lottery. [Photo by Yonhap News TV]

Under the pretext of joint Lotto lottery fund purchases, Mr. A received 50 million won from Mr. B on December 26, 2019, and embezzled approximately 238 million won over 19 transactions until April 21, 2020. However, Mr. A had never developed such a program nor won first or second prize in the Lotto; the only winnings were two third prizes. The number of possible Lotto combinations, selecting 6 numbers out of 45, is 8,145,060, making it impossible to secure profitability even with joint purchases.

Mr. A paid Mr. B 30 million won when he supposedly won second prize but then reclaimed it under the pretext of Lotto purchase costs, which was investigated as an attempt to gain Mr. B’s trust and defraud more money. In court, Mr. A claimed, "I used all the money received to buy Lotto tickets and had no intention to defraud."

Judge Park dismissed this, stating, "According to the defendant’s claim, he received 150 million won weekly from investors to purchase Lotto tickets," but "since the purchase limit per person is 100,000 won, it is physically impossible to buy 1,500 Lotto tickets weekly at 201 Lotto sales points in Daejeon city."

He added, "Considering that the defendant appears to have purchased a significant amount of Lotto tickets with his own money and that the victims, who paid large sums believing only the defendant’s unrealistic claims while dreaming of a windfall, also bear some responsibility," the judgment was made.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.