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No cure for jackpot?: Curbing online gambling a ‘tall order’, players said
The promise of getting rich quick and easy access has allowed online gambling to mushroom in Indonesia, to the tune of Rp 200 trillion worth of transactions. But not everyone, if anybody, is hitting the jackpot.
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Accessible: Online gambling sites are getting more prominent across Indonesia, with over 2 million players this year due to their accessibility. (JP/Radhiyya Indra)
Finding herself stuck in unemployment, 23-year-old Anindya resorted to an online gambling website her friends were talking about.
“I was personally just playing around last year,” the Jakarta-based private sector employee spoke to The Jakarta Post on Oct. 18.
Both Anindya and her friends are only a small demographic of the millions of Indonesians who play online gambling, an issue that the government has been trying to solve in recent years.
Gambling is illegal in Indonesia, be it online or offline.
Players and organizers can face up to 10 years in prison and a Rp 25 million fine as stipulated in Article 303 of the Criminal Code (KUHP). Its online distributors, on the other hand, can face six years in prison and a fine of Rp 1 billion, according to the Electronic Information and Transactions (ITE) Law.
But despite the government's continued effort to curb online gambling sites, players think the task may be next to impossible given the sites' existence and accessibility in every pop-up ad.
Efforts to curb online gambling sites have been underway since 2018, yet the activity has only grown bigger in size, to the point that its terms, from “slot” to “depo”, recently entered the daily vocabulary.
