[사회]16-year-old bet 190 million won… Half of online gamblers are teenagers [앵커리포트]

With the recent arrests of juvenile online gambling offenders, the shocking reality has been revealed that nearly half of all gamblers are juveniles.

Until last month, the National Police Agency had carried out a special crackdown on cyber gambling for about a year and arrested over 9,900 people.

However, almost half of them, or about 4,700, were teenagers.

The average amount of money wasted on gambling per person was 780,000 won.

It was confirmed that a 16-year-old male student had bet a whopping 190 million won.

How do teenagers become so addicted to gambling?

When we asked the arrested students how they got into online gambling, the most common answer was ‘curiosity.’

What is noteworthy is the next most common one, ‘friend introductions’.

Beyond simply gambling together,

This is because there were cases where people brought in acquaintances as if they were selling.

This is the so-called ‘distributor’.

In fact, early this year, members of an illegal gambling site worth 500 billion won were arrested, and 12 of them were youth distributors.

Recently, middle and high school students worked together to create and operate their own gambling server, but were caught by the police.

Youth are going beyond simple participants and playing the role of administrators.

Although there may be an impact of intensive crackdowns, the number of youths caught for provocation has increased by about 2,700% compared to a year ago.

Youth, who should be free to dream about their future, need all of society’s attention to prevent them from falling into the dark swamp of gambling.

YTN Jang Dong-wook (dwjang@ytn.co.kr)

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