Police Move Toward Online Gambling Crackdown

Akihabara News (Tokyo) — Recent moves by the National Police Agency suggest that the long-rumored crackdown on online gambling may finally be underway.

The strongest move came late last month when police made unprecedented arrests of five alleged settlement agents for online casinos based overseas, in this case the Netherlands.

According to the information which police released to the media, the suspects made over US$14 million in commissions on hundreds of millions of dollars sent to the overseas online casino operators. In other words, they were the financial middlemen who collected deposits from Japanese gamblers and then ensured that the foreign company or companies were paid for the customers’ gambling losses.

The investigators said that about 42,000 names were registered in the customer data of the arrested agents. Also, a couple dozen gamblers were charged with simple gambling.

Earlier in September, a man in Chiba Prefecture was arrested for posting videos of himself on YouTube as he was engaged in online gambling. One of the main problems with enforcement is the fact this crime usually takes place quietly in peoples’ private homes, but in this case the man broadcast his lawbreaking to the public.

The National Police Agency is eager to dispel the widespread notion that online gambling is a legal “gray area.” In fact, since 2013 it has been explicitly designated as a crime–at least for those who physically operate within Japan. In other words, Japanese law does not apply to the foreign online casino operators, but it does apply to anyone inside Japan who assists these operations–such as the financial settlement agents–as well as ordinary people who utilize these gambling services (which are marketed and operated in Japanese language).

There are thought to be nearly 3 million Japanese who sometimes engage in illegal online gambling.

In order to catch some of them–or least some of those who facilitate online casinos–from this month the National Police Agency is expanding the scope of its anonymous crime reporting system to include gambling offenses.

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