South Korea may well be having garlic gaming problems right now. This doesn’t mean that they’re simply cracking down on the garlic growers of the world as the extent of the country’s unregulated gambling market has been revealed.
It’s being reported by the Korea JoongAng Daily that the country has been looking at a bill to crackdown on unregulated Internet gambling in the country for around four years. In that time five bills have been submitted to the National Assembly with none of them making it through.
Last week’s haul of around $10bn from a garlic field seems to have turned heads around the world and those campaigning against unregulated sites in South Korea want to take action.
The country does already have a legal gaming industry with residents able to bet on horseracing, bicycle races, boat races, lottery, casinos and sports through the Sports Toto unit. It’s just that they aren’t anywhere near as attractive to the customer as the unregulated sites are.
The Korea Sports Promotion Foundation explained, “The National Gaming Control Commission (NGCC) should focus on managing the legal gambling industry to sharpen competitiveness in the market rather than focusing only on tightening regulations.”
The group mentioned above, the NGCC, are the ones bearing the brunt of criticisms thanks to their policy of doing nothing about unregulated gambling whilst making the legal regulations more restrictive.
An official of the Korea Racing Authority (KRA) said, “Excessive regulation by the National Gaming Control Commission is the problem, such as regulating maximum profit or adopting electronic cards to limit bets on legal horse racing.”
This obviously means that customers turn to unregulated sites for their kicks leaving the legalised sites in the dark.
The NGCC has found in the past that unregulated sites earn profits of around 32 trillion win ($29billion) per year, accounting for around 60 per cent of the country’s burgeoning unregulated gambling industry.
