One of the earliest reports of a lottery that used three (千字, or “thousand characters”) and four (万字, or “ten thousand characters”) digits in Singapore was in 1956, when members of a family who had been caught running an illegal gambling operation went on trial. A detective from Penang was brought to Singapore to testify as an expert witness. According to him, the lottery originated in Kedah in 1951, when a schoolboy raffled off his bicycle with tickets containing two-digit numbers. The winning ticket was the one whose numbers matched the last two digits of the first-prize ticket drawn at the turf club sweepstake.

In 1985, the state-owned Singapore Pools announced plans to roll out the computerised sale of 4D lottery, to which members of Parliament and the media expressed concern regarding the increased ease of access to gambling. The move was meant to curb illegal betting by providing punters with legal betting avenues. In May 1986, Singapore Pools introduced Singapore 4D lottery and computerisation sale at its outlets, which then numbered almost a hundred across the country. Singapore Pools set a minimum age of 18 for Toto (two-digit lottery) and 4D betting.

Motorists slowing down at accident sites to note the registration numbers of vehicles involved in accidents for their 4D bets is a well-known phenomenon in Singapore. Punters are also known to flock to remote parts of Singapore and Malaysia to pray to temple deities, to cemeteries and other sites reputed for giving winning numbers. They even turn up at murder sites in their hunt for “lucky numbers”, which could be in the form of registration numbers of police vehicles or the block or unit numbers of the crime scene. Another lottery fad that gripped Singaporeans in the early 2000s was the rearing of the Flowerhorn fish, commonly known as the luohan, to decipher the spots and markings on their scales for lucky numbers.