Can a Foreigner Win Korea's Lotto? At Least 25 Already Have: Every Korean Lottery, Sports Toto, and the Casino Rule That Flips for Tourists

Last updated: September 2026

On 21 March 2016, two days after the 694th Lotto 6/45 draw, a man from Myanmar in his late thirties walked into the headquarters of NH Bank (NH농협은행) in Seodaemun, Seoul, with a passport, an alien registration card and a ₩5,000 lottery slip carrying the numbers 7, 15, 20, 25, 33 and 43. He was a factory worker, and the Korean lottery paid him like anyone else: the slip was worth ₩1.555 billion, and after 33 percent tax he was paid ₩1.087 billion. He then tried to wire all of it to Myanmar in one go, ran into transfer limits, and came back to the bank almost every day for three weeks to send it home in pieces. A bank employee told the Segye Ilbo that it was the first time the branch had watched a foreign national collect a first prize in person.

He was not the first. Between December 2007 and March 2016, twenty-five foreigners won first prize in Korea's Lotto 6/45, ten of them in 2015 alone; the biggest single win was ₩4.061 billion in draw 639 in February 2015, and the smallest ₩565 million in 2010. In the same period 20,620 foreign residents and 1,552 short-term visitors won a prize of some size. The rule behind all of that is short: anyone aged 19 or over can buy a Korean lottery ticket, and anyone who wins can collect with a passport. The lottery is one of the few Korean systems that never asks whether you are Korean.

The casino is the other one, and it asks the opposite question. Korea has seventeen casinos that will not admit a Korean citizen at all, and one, in a former mining valley in Gangwon, that admits Koreans for ₩9,000 a visit and no more than fifteen days a month. A foreigner walks into any of the eighteen for free on a passport. This post is the complete map of legal betting in Korea for a visitor or a resident: what each lottery costs and pays, what the tax takes, where you physically collect, how Sports Toto works and who can use it, where the lucky shops are, and the one flip in the casino law that surprises every Korean who learns it.

Every Lotto 6/45 first prize in Korea is paid at one address: NH Bank's headquarters on Tongil-ro in Seodaemun, Seoul. This is where the Myanmar winner came back every day for three weeks. Photo: LERK, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Where Koreans keep a winning slip: a bokjumeoni (복주머니) lucky pouch, the silk fortune bag handed out at New Year, is what a Korean grandmother would tell you to put a lottery ticket in, and it is the souvenir this post is actually about. As an Amazon Associate, EpicKor earns from qualifying purchases.

Quick Guide: every legal bet in Korea, in one table

Two things every visitor gets wrong are in that table. Prizes are shared, not fixed, so the Korean jackpot is small by American standards, and the casino rule runs backwards: it is the local who is turned away at the door.

Yes, foreigners can play, and the winners are on record

There is no residency requirement to buy a Korean lottery ticket and none to collect. The operator's own rule is that you must be 19 or over and physically hold the winning ticket; the bank asks for a government ID, and for a foreigner that means a passport, or an alien registration card (외국인등록증) if you have one. Nothing in the Lottery and Lottery Fund Act distinguishes citizens from anyone else.

The records back it up. The Seoul Economic Daily counted, from late 2007 to November 2011, 14,500 foreign winners of fourth prize or better, ₩13 billion in prize money, six first prizes, the largest a ₩2.7 billion win by an ethnic Korean from China, and about 2,000 winners who were in Korea on short visits. One Thai winner had overstayed his visa; he paid the fine, collected, and flew home. The Segye Ilbo's 2016 count of twenty-five foreign first-prize winners covers December 2007 to March 2016. Since then the operator has stopped publishing winners by nationality, so the number is higher and nobody outside the operator knows by how much. A widely repeated 2023 story about a Nepali factory worker in Hwaseong who won first prize in draw 1068 and quietly went home comes from an online forum, not a newspaper, and we could not confirm it.

What is worth noticing in the 2016 numbers is a gap. Of the 1,552 short-term visitors who won something in eight years, none won first prize. The 25 first prizes went to residents. That is not luck; it is volume. Residents buy every week, and Lotto 6/45 is a game of volume.

Lotto 6/45: how ₩1,000 works

Lotto 6/45 (로또 6/45) started in December 2002 and is the reason there are 9,338 dedicated lottery shops in Korea as of November 2025, on the way to a planned 9,582. Convenience stores sell it too, usually from a terminal at the counter. You pick six numbers from 45, or let the terminal pick them, at ₩1,000 a game; the slip has five rows, A to E, so a full slip is ₩5,000. Koreans call the three methods 자동 (auto), 수동 (manual, you mark all six) and 반자동 (semi-auto, you mark some and the machine fills the rest). Tell the clerk "자동 오천 원" (jadong ocheon won) and you will get five auto games for ₩5,000, which is what most people buy.

What the terminal prints: five games, the draw number, the payment deadline printed on the face (one year), and a QR code you can scan in the Donghaeng Lottery app to check the result. Image: Donghaeng Lottery official guide, shown for identification.

The draw is on Saturday at 20:35, live on MBC, and sales stop at 20:00 that day; on other days shops sell from 06:00 to midnight. The odds of matching all six are 1 in 8,145,060. Second prize (five numbers plus the bonus) is 1 in 1,357,510, third (five numbers) 1 in 35,724, fourth (four numbers, a fixed ₩50,000) 1 in 733, and fifth (three numbers, a fixed ₩5,000) 1 in 45.

The jackpot is a pool, not a fixed sum, and that is why Korean first prizes look small. Half of every ₩1,000 goes to prizes, 43.6 percent to the public Lottery Fund, 5.4 percent to the shop and 1 percent to running costs. In 2025 Koreans bought ₩5.956 trillion of Lotto 6/45 tickets, 5.4 percent more than the year before, and 812 people won first prize, an average of ₩2.06 billion each before tax, about ₩1.41 billion after. That is the lowest average since 2002 and it keeps falling because more people win each week. Draw 1128 in July 2024 had 63 first-prize winners sharing about ₩420 million each. The record still belongs to April 2003, when one ticket took ₩40.7 billion; the ticket price was halved to ₩1,000 in 2004 and the rollover rules tightened, and the ₩10 billion jackpot has not come back. Since 2002 Korea has sold ₩85.94 trillion of Lotto tickets and paid out ₩20.47 trillion in first prizes to 10,153 people.

There is a legal purchase cap of ₩100,000 per person per visit, written into the enforcement decree of the Lottery Act. Korean reporters have tested it and found it is almost never enforced; the clerk sells you the next slip. It is still the law.

The other lotteries: a pension, a scratch card, and a screen

Pension Lottery 720+ (연금복권720+) is the one Koreans in their thirties talk about, because the prize is a salary. First prize is ₩7 million a month for twenty years, ₩1.68 billion in total, paid as ₩5.46 million a month after the 22 percent tax. Second prize is ₩1 million a month for ten years. A ticket is ₩1,000, you choose a group (조) and a six-digit number or take a random one, and the draw is on Thursday evening. The appeal is exactly that it cannot be spent at once; Korean papers write about first-prize winners who kept their jobs.

Speetto (스피또) is the scratch card, sold at the same counters, in three prices. Speetto 500 costs ₩500 and tops out at ₩200 million with first-prize odds of 1 in 4 million; Speetto 1000 costs ₩1,000, tops out at ₩500 million, odds 1 in 5 million; Speetto 2000 costs ₩2,000, tops out at ₩1 billion, odds 1 in 5 million. Roughly one card in three wins something, mostly its own price back, and 60 percent of sales go back out as prizes. Scratch three matching amounts and you have won that amount. Speetto is the lottery that travellers actually win: in August 2026 a visitor to Gwangyang in South Jeolla bought ten Speetto 1000 cards on a whim at a shop they passed while travelling, scratched them at their pension that night, and one was the ₩500 million first prize of round 108. Speetto sales hit ₩894.6 billion in 2025, more than five times 2015.

Electronic lotteries (Powerball, Speed Keno, Triple Luck, Catch Me, Treasure Hunter and the rest) exist only on the Donghaeng Lottery website and app, draw every few minutes, and need a verified Korean account. They are not for visitors and, honestly, not for anyone; Koreans call them the ones that turn into a habit.

Before Lotto: the Olympic Lottery of 1983 to 1988 cost ₩500 and paid a ₩100 million first prize, and paid for the 1988 Seoul Games and public housing. This is the 236th issue, drawn 11 October 1987. National Folk Museum of Korea collection, KOGL Type 1.

Korea's lottery is older than Lotto. The Olympic Lottery ran from 1983 to 1988 at ₩500 a ticket with a ₩100 million top prize, printed with scenes from the countries coming to the Seoul Games, and the housing lottery before it goes back to 1969. Lotto's arrival in 2002 folded most of the old paper draws into one game, and total lottery sales went from ₩3.555 trillion in 2015 to ₩7.335 trillion in 2025. The government's 2026 plan is ₩8.1 trillion.

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What the tax takes, for you and for the man from Myanmar

Korean lottery tax is withheld at the counter and that is the end of it; there is no return to file. Since 1 January 2023, any single prize of ₩2 million or less is tax-free, which covers fourth and fifth prizes and most third prizes. Above ₩2 million the rate is 22 percent (20 percent income tax plus 2 percent local tax) on the portion up to ₩300 million, and 33 percent on everything above ₩300 million.

On the 2025 average first prize of ₩2.06 billion, the arithmetic is ₩300 million at 22 percent (₩66 million) plus ₩1.76 billion at 33 percent (₩580.8 million), a total of ₩646.8 million in tax and ₩1.413 billion in hand. The Myanmar winner in 2016 was paid under the older two-band rule and kept 70 percent.

Foreigners are taxed by residence, not nationality. If you live in Korea, meaning an address here or 183 days or more in the year, you pay exactly what a Korean pays. If you are a non-resident, a tourist, the withholding depends on the tax treaty between Korea and your country. Korean lottery officials have said, in print, that non-residents from treaty countries generally owe no Korean tax on lottery winnings; the National Tax Service's position is more careful: the treaty decides, an exemption has to be applied for with a certificate of residence by the ninth of the month after payment, and if there is no treaty Korea taxes the whole prize. What is certain is that your own country will want to hear about it. The United States taxes a citizen's foreign lottery win as ordinary income in the year it is received. If you are a tourist holding a large winning ticket, the practical advice is to call the National Tax Service helpline (126, which has an English service) before you go to the bank, and to expect the bank to withhold first and let you reclaim later.

Where you actually collect, and the one-year clock

Prizes are paid by size, not by which shop sold the ticket.

The deadline is one year from the day payment opens for that draw, and it is printed on the slip. After that the money goes to the Lottery Fund. Koreans leave a startling amount behind: ₩43 billion unclaimed in 2021, ₩52.1 billion in 2023, ₩58.1 billion in 2025, including ₩8.4 billion of first prize. Most of it is ₩5,000 and ₩50,000 wins nobody bothered to check. From 18 August 2026 there is a fix for paper tickets: scan the slip's QR code into the Payco app and the system watches it for you, tells you on draw night, and on the deadline automatically pays anything unclaimed, as app points up to ₩2 million and to a bank account above that. That requires a Korean phone and a Korean account, so for a visitor the rule stays the old one: check the slip before you fly.

A first-prize claim at NH headquarters is a routine appointment, not an event. You are asked to sign a form, taxes come off, and the money is transferred to an account you name; the bank does not hand over cash. For a foreigner without a Korean account this is the step to solve first, because the Myanmar winner's three weeks of daily visits were entirely about moving money, not about being paid.

Buying online: possible for residents, not for tourists

Donghaeng Lottery (동행복권), the operator, sells Lotto 6/45 on its website and, since 9 February 2026, on its mobile web page on weekdays from 06:00 to midnight. Membership needs Korean phone identity verification, which a foreign resident with an alien registration number and a Korean carrier contract can pass; the registration name has to match the card exactly, which is where most foreigners' attempts fail. Online purchases are capped at ₩5,000 a draw per person, PC and mobile combined, so the website is for one slip a week, not for volume. There is no app yet for Lotto itself. A tourist with a foreign phone cannot register, and the honest answer is that a tourist does not need to: the shop at the corner sells the same ticket.

The lucky shops, and what they actually sell

Two shops in Korea have produced first-prize winners so many times that people queue for them.

Spa (스파), a lottery shop in a 1980s apartment shopping arcade in Sanggye-dong, Nowon-gu, Seoul (동일로 1493, in the Sanggye Jugong 10 complex arcade), is Seoul's most famous. Counts differ by source and by whether manual and auto wins are tallied together, but the shop has produced first prize more than thirty times and second prize well over two hundred, four first prizes and 22 second prizes since 2025 alone. It is a three-minute walk from Madeul station (Line 7, exit 5) or seven minutes from Nowon station (Lines 4 and 7, exit 8), there is no parking and a camera on the main road, and there is a queue at most hours. Buil Car Service (부일카서비스) in Beomil-dong, Busan (자성로133번길 35, eight minutes from Beomil station on Line 1, exit 4) is a car-repair shop that sells Lotto from a window and has produced first prize 33 times by one count, the most in the country; it has a queue on weekday mornings.

Neither shop changes your odds. Every ticket in Korea is 1 in 8,145,060, and these two shops win often because they sell enormously more tickets than anyone else; the queue is the cause of the reputation, not the effect. What they sell is the ritual: the JoongAng Daily found people driving hours to buy at Spa and framing the receipt. If you want the experience, go on a weekday and bring cash; the shop's whole stock is ₩1,000 slips and a wall of newspaper clippings.

Sports Toto: the other half of Korea's betting money

Korea's legal sports betting is a state pool, not a bookmaker. Sports Toto (스포츠토토) is issued under the Korea Sports Promotion Foundation (국민체육진흥공단, KSPO) and sold by a contracted operator, and it is enormous: KSPO's 2025 revenue was ₩6.33 trillion, and ₩5.62 trillion of it, 88.8 percent, came from Toto sales. There are two products with confusingly similar names.

• Toto (토토) is the pool game: predict the outcomes of a fixed set of matches (win, draw, lose across 14 football matches, or scores in baseball and basketball) and share the pool with everyone who got it right.
• Proto (프로토) is the fixed-odds game: choose two to ten matches from the list, the odds are printed before the match, and the payout is your stake times the combined odds. Proto is what most people mean by "toto".

Both are sold at Toto shops (the sign says 스포츠토토, usually next to the Lotto sign) and online at Betman (betman.co.kr), the only legal site. The limits are strict: ₩100,000 per person per round, and a ticket cannot pay more than ₩100 million; the terminal refuses a bet whose odds times stake would exceed that. Football, basketball, baseball, volleyball and golf are covered, including foreign leagues, which is why a Premier League match on a Sunday morning has a Korean betting line.

Foreigners could always buy at a shop. Online was closed until 27 April 2023, when the operator opened Betman membership to foreign residents; before that the site accepted only holders of a Korean resident registration number. Registration needs an alien registration number and phone verification, the same as the lottery site, so this too is for residents. The tax rule is different from the lottery's: a Toto win is tax-free if the odds were 100 times or less and the payout ₩2 million or less, or if the payout is ₩100,000 or less whatever the odds; above that the lottery rates apply, 22 percent to ₩300 million and 33 percent beyond. Unclaimed Proto winnings expire too; the operator warned in April 2026 that ₩1.3 billion in unclaimed match-winnings would lapse the following month.

The warning that belongs here: any sports betting site other than Betman is illegal in Korea, however professional it looks and whatever language it is in, and using one is an offence for the bettor as well as the operator. The illegal market is estimated at many times the legal one, the ads are on every second video, and foreign residents are prosecuted along with Koreans. If it is not Betman or a shop with the KSPO sign, it is not legal.

Inspire, at Incheon Airport, opened its casino in 2024 and is the newest of Korea's foreigner-only casinos. A Korean citizen cannot enter the gaming floor. Photo: Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

The casino rule that runs backwards

Korea's Tourism Promotion Act licenses casinos as a foreign-currency business, and it means that literally: seventeen casinos in Korea admit only foreign passports. Three are in Seoul (Seven Luck Gangnam at COEX, Seven Luck at Seoul Dragon City in Yongsan, which moved there from the Millennium Hilton in January 2023, and Paradise Walkerhill), two in Busan, two at Incheon Airport (Paradise City and Inspire), eight on Jeju, one in Daegu and one in Gangwon. Entry is free, you show a passport at the desk the first time, and you must be 19. A Korean citizen who walks onto the floor is committing a crime, and so is the casino that lets them.

The single exception is Kangwon Land (강원랜드) in Jeongseon, three hours east of Seoul in a valley of closed coal mines, opened in 2000 under a separate law meant to give the mining towns an economy after the pits shut. It is the only casino in the country where a Korean can gamble, and the state makes it deliberately inconvenient: ₩9,000 entry per visit for Koreans, an ID check against a resident registration address, a limit of fifteen days a month, and residents of the surrounding county allowed in once a month. Foreigners enter Kangwon Land free, on a passport, with no day limit; since 2025 it has been trialling a foreigner-only zone with table limits raised from ₩100,000 to ₩20 million to compete with Macau.

The door a Korean citizen can enter, for ₩9,000 and no more than fifteen days a month: Kangwon Land, Jeongseon. Photo: Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.

The logic, which Koreans will explain without being asked, is that gambling addiction is treated as a public-health problem and the casino is quarantined from the public it would harm; foreign tourists are outside the quarantine. The same country that bans its citizens from a card table sells them ₩7.3 trillion of lottery tickets a year, and a Korean will also explain that: the lottery is capped at ₩100,000 a visit, half the money goes to public housing, scholarships and welfare through the Lottery Fund, and nobody has ever lost a house on a Saturday night at a ₩1,000 counter.

Paradise Casino Jeju Grand, one of the eight foreigner-only casinos on Jeju. Photo: Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

For a visitor the practical version is: bring the passport, not a photocopy; entry is free at all of them; minimum table bets at the Seoul casinos run from about ₩1,000 to ₩10,000 depending on the game; the floors are open 24 hours; and Kangwon Land is the only one worth a trip for the place itself, because the resort, the ski slopes and the valley are the point and the casino is a large, slightly sad room.

Don't do this

• Don't post a photo of a winning slip before you have claimed it. The QR code and barcode on it are the claim; a clear photo is a copy of your ticket. Koreans cover the barcode with a finger for the celebration photo.
• Don't buy from a "lotto agent" or a site that sells Korean Lotto abroad. Resale of Korean lottery tickets is illegal and the operator will not pay a prize claimed through one.
• Don't miss the year. ₩58.1 billion went unclaimed in 2025. The deadline is printed on the slip.
• Don't assume the online cap is a bug. ₩5,000 a draw online is the rule, and buying more through several accounts is a reason to void a prize.
• Don't use any sports betting site except Betman. Not one of the others is legal in Korea, and residents on visas have been charged.
• Don't take a Korean friend to the casino. They cannot come in, and if they somehow do, the crime is theirs.

FAQ

Q: Can a foreigner buy a lottery ticket in Korea? Yes. Anyone 19 or over can buy Lotto 6/45, Pension Lottery 720+ and Speetto scratch cards at any lottery shop or convenience-store terminal, on any visa or none. Online purchase needs a Korean phone and an alien registration number, so it is for residents.

Q: Can a foreigner collect a Korean lottery prize? Yes, with a passport or alien registration card. At least 25 foreigners won Lotto 6/45 first prize between 2007 and 2016, and a Myanmar factory worker collected ₩1.555 billion at NH Bank headquarters in 2016. Prizes over ₩2 million are paid at NH Bank branches, and first prize only at the Seoul headquarters.

Q: How much tax does Korea take from lottery winnings? Nothing up to ₩2 million per prize. Above that, 22 percent up to ₩300 million and 33 percent on the rest, withheld at payment. Residents, foreign or Korean, pay the same; non-residents are taxed according to the tax treaty with their country and should check with the National Tax Service before claiming.

Q: What does Korean Lotto cost and when is the draw? ₩1,000 a game, five games on a ₩5,000 slip. The draw is Saturday at 20:35 on MBC and sales close at 20:00. The odds of first prize are 1 in 8,145,060, and the 2025 average first prize was ₩2.06 billion before tax.

Q: Can tourists gamble in Korean casinos? Yes, that is who they are for. Seventeen casinos admit only foreign passports, with free entry; Kangwon Land in Gangwon admits both, charging Koreans ₩9,000 and foreigners nothing. Korean citizens are barred from every casino except Kangwon Land.

Q: Can foreigners use Sports Toto? Yes. Toto and Proto are sold at shops with the 스포츠토토 sign to anyone 19 or over, up to ₩100,000 per round. The online site Betman has accepted foreign residents with an alien registration number since 27 April 2023. Every other betting site is illegal.

Bottom Line

Korea's betting laws sort people by residence and by citizenship, and they sort them in opposite directions. The lottery ignores your passport: a ₩1,000 slip, a Saturday draw, one bank in Seodaemun, and a tax bill that is the same for a Myanmar factory worker as for the mayor. The casino reads your passport and admits you because of it, while sending the Korean beside you to a valley in Gangwon with a ₩9,000 ticket and a fifteen-day limit. Between them sits Sports Toto, a state pool worth ₩5.6 trillion a year, open to anyone at the counter and to residents online since 2023. If you want to play, the ticket costs ₩1,000, the odds are 1 in 8 million, the shop with the queue in Nowon does not improve them, and the one thing you must not lose is the slip, because a year later ₩58 billion belongs to nobody.

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Sources

• Segye Ilbo, "Twenty-five foreigners have won Lotto first prize" and "Third foreign first-prize winner this year collects ₩1.5 billion" (21 April 2016); Seoul Economic Daily on foreign lottery winners 2007 to 2011 (3 October 2012); Ilgan NTN, "Income tax when a foreigner wins a Korean lottery" (31 August 2021); SBS on the ₩2 million tax-free threshold (2023).
• Donghaeng Lottery (dhlottery.co.kr): game rules, winner's guide and payment locations, revenue allocation, Speetto odds and prize tables; Kyunghyang Shinmun on 2025 Lotto sales, 812 first-prize winners and the ₩2.06 billion average (2 February 2026); Ministry of Economy and Finance Lottery Commission 2025 sales results (January 2026) and 2027 issuance plan (28 April 2026).
• Asia Economy, Financial News and Nongmin Shinmun on the automatic payment of unclaimed winnings from 18 August 2026 and unclaimed totals 2021 to 2025; Toss Bank on mobile Lotto purchase from 9 February 2026; Le Desk and Sky Daily on the ₩100,000 purchase limit; Baby News on lottery shop numbers (December 2025).
• Money Today on the Speetto 1000 first prize in Gwangyang (August 2026); Newsworks, Tour Tok Tok and Econovill on Spa (Nowon) and Buil Car Service (Busan); Korea JoongAng Daily, "All about Korea's lottery hot spots".
• Sports Toto (sportstoto.co.kr) Proto rules and FAQ; Kyunghyang Sports and Korea Daily on Betman opening to foreign residents (20 April 2023); Nate Sports on unclaimed Proto winnings (30 April 2026); KSPO 2025 revenue figures.
• Kangwon Land / High1 casino entry rules; Financial News and Nate on the foreigner-only zone (February 2025); Namu Wiki and the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism casino status (April 2025) on the seventeen foreigner-only casinos; the Tourism Promotion Act and the Special Act on Assistance to Abandoned Mine Areas.