South Korea’s Teen Gambling Crackdown Draws 806 Self-Reports

A police campaign offering leniency to young gamblers in South Korea is drawing hundreds of teenagers into the authorities’ orbit, as officials confront an online gambling problem that can begin with a small promotional payment and quickly turn into serious debt.

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Since the campaign began on May 18, police have received 806 self-reports. There were 294 in its first month and another 512 in the second.

The offer is straightforward. Anyone aged 19 or younger who admits to gambling by Aug. 31 can avoid formal punishment in favour of a warning or another lenient measure. A formal gambling offence can otherwise carry a fine of up to 10 million won.

The campaign has also brought in one of South Korea’s biggest esports figures. Professional gamer Lee Sang-hyeok, known globally as Faker, was appointed an ambassador for the youth gambling prevention effort in July.

The numbers matter because the problem is not necessarily visible in the wider teenage population.

A Korea Problem Gambling Agency study of 13,481 students from fourth through 12th grade found that 4 percent had gambled. But among those who had, almost one in five were still gambling six months after their first experience.

That persistence is where the bigger risk appears.

The first bet is often online

For 82 percent of teenagers who had gambled in the study, the first experience happened on the internet.

Illegal gambling operators have an obvious advantage there. They can reach young users through advertising on websites they already visit, including webtoon and illegal streaming platforms, as well as through unsolicited text messages and social media.

More than half of the students surveyed, 54 percent, said they had encountered gambling advertising.

The promotions can be designed to make the first step look almost harmless. Some offer new users 30,000 won. Others require an initial deposit before allowing winnings to be withdrawn.

That first successful payout can change the calculation for a teenager. What began as a small wager starts to resemble an easy way of making money.

The financial consequences can then escalate sharply.

Treatment workers at the Korea Gambling Addiction Treatment Center have encountered teenagers carrying debts running into tens of millions of won. In some cases, debts have reached 100 million won. For families, the amounts can be far beyond what a teenager could realistically repay from an allowance or part-time income.

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The pressure does not always stay financial.

Teenagers struggling to fund gambling have also become involved in offences ranging from theft to scams and voice-phishing schemes. Treatment workers have reported cases involving fraudulent listings on secondhand marketplaces, where teenagers collect deposits for expensive goods and then disappear without delivering them.

There is another concern that is harder to measure: how early gambling can become embedded in a person’s behaviour.

The treatment centre has reported that adults seeking help after beginning to gamble as teenagers generally describe a pattern that continued rather than a habit that disappeared and later returned.

Police campaign is only one part of the response

The self-report programme sits alongside a broader attempt to make gambling prevention more systematic.

A proposed change in the National Assembly would require elementary, middle and high schools to provide gambling prevention education at least once every semester. Existing law calls for prevention education but does not clearly establish how frequently it must take place, leaving significant differences between schools.

The proposal would also create a more structured framework for what that education should contain.

Government agencies are tackling another route into illegal gambling: the websites that carry its advertising.

Since May 11, the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism has ordered 34 copyright-infringing websites to be shut down. Some of those sites are illegal streaming platforms where gambling advertisements can appear.

Closing them may remove one source of exposure, but it does not eliminate the underlying distribution network. Social media and personal recommendations can still direct teenagers towards illegal gambling sites.

That leaves police with a difficult balance. The current campaign is designed to bring young gamblers forward before their behaviour develops into a more serious legal and financial problem. The unusually high number of self-reports suggests many teenagers are willing to take that route when the threat of punishment is reduced.

The deadline is Aug. 31. Until then, the authorities are effectively asking young gamblers to come forward while they still have a way out.

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Source: www.koreajoongangdaily.com