Sharing Gambling Sites Like a Game Among Friends
Unable to Quit Gambling Leads to Psychiatric Hospitalization
Recently, as online gambling such as baccarat and roulette has become rampant among teenagers, a case of a middle school student losing as much as 100 million won through gambling has been revealed, causing shock.
According to MBC on the 16th, A and B, both third-year middle school students and friends, engaged in online gambling for periods ranging from a few months to as long as a year. They easily accessed gambling by sharing links to gambling sites among friends as if it were a game. Their entry into gambling was triggered by another friend's bragging about "winning money."
A said, "At first, I tried to win about 50,000 won with 10,000 won next to my friend, sometimes winning a little less, and then I asked him, 'Which site do you use?' and learned from him," adding, "If I didn't do it, I felt like a sucker."
The scale of teenage gambling varies widely from a few million won to tens of millions of won, and in some cases, when they had no money, they borrowed money from friends or family and incurred debts of tens of millions of won. A said, "One friend couldn't quit gambling and even went to a psychiatric hospital for about a month. He borrowed so much money from friends that his family became financially unstable," adding, "I know his gambling debt is about 100 million won."
The number of juvenile gambling arrests increased more than twofold from 72 cases in 2019 to 184 cases in four years. Especially this year, 176 cases were detected in just four months. The number of arrests of juveniles under 13 years old, who are considered criminally irresponsible, increased from zero to 20 during the same period, indicating that the age of those engaging in gambling is also decreasing. The problem is that online gambling can be easily done by anyone anytime and anywhere with a smartphone without any special authentication process. Also, if those around them do not pay attention, it is difficult to notice what they are doing on their smartphones, which is another cause of the increase in teenage gambling.
In April, a teenage gang was arrested by the police for setting up a gambling server on social networking services (SNS) and inducing internet gambling targeting about 1,500 people, including elementary school students and teenagers, receiving over 200 million won in remittances and pocketing about 20 million won. The Busan Police Cyber Crime Investigation Unit arrested a man in his 20s who operated the gambling site on charges of opening a gambling house, gambling, and violating the Electronic Financial Transactions Act, and booked 16 others without detention, including middle school student C, the mastermind, and high school student D, the server administrator.
The crime began with the collusion of C and D. They were interested in games and data recovery and had considerable computer skills. They became friends in an internet community and joined forces, later creating a gambling server on the gaming SNS 'Discord.' C was in charge of overall operations, while D developed and maintained the server. They posted recruitment ads for staff on the gambling server to attract accomplices. The arrested operator was initially a gambling user who became an operator after seeing the staff recruitment notice. C and D also recruited middle and high school students as staff to charge and exchange game money, and to avoid police tracking, they bought bank accounts used for receiving money from five middle and high school students for 100,000 to 200,000 won per account.
In particular, when C faced police investigation, he shared the investigation details with an adult operator and even helped him run the gambling server alone. Among the suspects booked for gambling, most (96 out of 98) were teenagers, including one elementary school student and two female middle school students. The highest amount bet by one person was 2.18 million won, and one high school student was confirmed to have deposited and bet 325 times over four months. Users of the illegal gambling server accessed it not only through invitation links but also through friends' introductions or banner ads on other game servers.
The police, after shutting down the gambling server, notified guardians of 96 teenage gambling users showing signs of addiction and linked them to guidance programs. They also requested related agencies to improve the system so that guardian authentication is possible when subscribing to web hosting services necessary for operating gambling sites.
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