So-called "gold numbers" such as 1004, 5555 and 7777 — license plate combinations prized by car owners in South Korea — have repeatedly been assigned to specific vehicles or registration agencies even after going through a supposedly random lottery. Some public officials gave the sought-after numbers to their own cars or to vehicles handled by particular agencies. Records of how local governments across the country processed these requests also show cases where the work was concentrated in the hands of a single official or where numbers were repeatedly canceled and re-registered.
According to data submitted by the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport and local governments nationwide to the office of Rep. Eom Tae-young of the People Power Party, a member of the National Assembly's Land, Infrastructure and Transport Committee, a total of 85,551 cases involving 53 sought-after vehicle registration numbers were processed nationwide between January 2016 and August 2026. The data was released on the 12th.
Under the current Vehicle Registration Decree, registration numbers are assigned by randomly drawing 10 numbers from a given range and letting the owner choose one. But at some local governments, the system was abused in the process of canceling or correcting numbers after the draw and managing them as "reserved numbers."
In the Seo District of Gwangju, when sought-after numbers such as 5555 or 1004 were assigned to ordinary applicants' vehicles, the official in charge canceled or corrected the assignment on their own authority and logged the number in the computer system as a reserved number. Later, when a registration agency applied to register a particular vehicle, the number was handed out through direct designation rather than a random draw. In the Seo District of Gwangju alone, 346 vehicles improperly received sought-after numbers this way over the past three years.
Safeguards against conflicts of interest were also inadequate when officials handled numbers for their own cars or for vehicles registered through particular agencies. At the Vehicle Registration Office in Yongin, Gyeonggi Province, an audit found that one official was directly involved in assigning sought-after numbers to vehicles belonging to themselves and their spouse. The same official was also found to have assigned numbers such as 7777 to 11 vehicles registered by a particular administrative agent, and received heavy disciplinary action.
Records of how local governments nationwide processed sought-after numbers also showed the work concentrated in the hands of specific officials. In Shinan County, South Jeolla Province, 85.9% of all such cases, or 158, were handled under a single official's ID. In Haman County, South Gyeongsang Province, 75.0% went through one official's ID, while the figures were 50.2% in Yangju and 43.1% in Uijeongbu, both in Gyeonggi Province.
In Uijeongbu, 223 of the 998 sought-after number cases, or 22.3%, involved "revisions" that changed a number after registration. There were also 44 groups of cases in which the same number was repeatedly canceled and re-registered on the same day. Still, the concentration of work under one official or the repeated cancellations and re-registrations do not by themselves confirm that every assignment was improper.
Complaints have also continued to pile up across the country — including in Gangwon State, Gyeonggi Province, Incheon and North Chungcheong Province — amid suspicions over the hoarding of gold numbers, collusion with registration agencies and cash payments.
Eom said the core of the problem lies less in the random draw itself than in the cancellation, revision and reservation procedures that follow it. "The essence of the problem was not the random draw itself, but the back door of cancellation, revision and reservation that takes place after the draw is over," he said. "The Korea Transportation Safety Authority and the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport need to work together to put in place a standing monitoring system that detects abnormal signs in the computer logs in real time as soon as possible."
Proposed safeguards include a system that automatically flags cases when processing is concentrated under one official or when cancellations and re-registrations spike, and a function that blocks officials from handling registrations for vehicles belonging to themselves or their relatives. Other measures include automatically locking a number when a gold number is canceled or revised, requiring approval by two people, and mandating that the entire process be preserved in audit logs.