Police in Thailand say they have shut down 391 foreign and local Web sites and arrested 58 people, including seven suspected bookmakers, in a crackdown on illegal betting on the World Cup.
Police Lieutenant-General Anat Sirhiran, who is in charge of the police section assigned to tackle the country’s vast gambling underground, said authorities are monitoring and blocking all attempts to reopen the sites under new URLs, according to the news site AsiaOne.
However, another top police officer, a colonel who serves as a superintendent of the government’s High Tech Crime Unit, recently sounded a different note, saying blacklisting gambling sites is not a priority for his unit, for the simple reason that the amount of filtering necessary would make accessing the Internet “painfully slow” for the rest of the country. True Money, Thailand’s largest online payment processor, said much the same in a recent report in the English-language Bangkok Post.
In Thailand, where Buddhist norms dictate the prohibition of all forms of gambling except horseracing and lottery, a 2013 survey by the Center of Gambling Studies at Bangkok-based Chulalongkorn University found that 57% of its 5,000 respondents admitted to being gamblers, with those betting on football spending an average of 260,000 baht a year (US$8,000).
Nationally, about 80% of bets are handled through networks of agents and sub-agents. Four major entities control most of the action, according to a researcher with the Faculty of Economics at Dhurakij Pundit University in Bangkok, who told the Post that leading second-tier operatives often handle wagers exceeding 80 million baht ($2.4 million) a month.
The political unrest in Thailand may have compounded the problems authorities are facing with the onset of the World Cup. Reports are that Thais have been reluctant since the military coup to cross into Cambodia to feed their passion in the dozens of small casinos along the border where they contribute more than 90% of revenues. Operators in the border town of Poipet say the number of Thai patrons has dropped by almost half since the May coup, an observation borne out by statistics from the international checkpoint there, which show the number of people passing through declining from an average of about 1,500 a day to about 700.
Concerns that a lot of this money will wash into illegal channels back home prompted the military government to resort to national television to publicly instruct the army and police to be on the lookout for bookmakers. They were warned that failure to act would result in disciplinary action and/or criminal punishment. It wasn’t long after that the commissioner of police for the north-central province of Phitsanulok swiftly removed four high-ranking officers from active duty after soldiers busted a local gambling den. In the resort enclave of Pattaya, six Australians and a New Zealander recently were arrested on charges of running an illegal betting operation out of a bar.
At the same time, the chorus of those who question the wisdom of prohibition is growing, among them the colonel at the High Tech Crimes Unit, who complained that Thailand is “stuck in the mindset that gambling is a vice under Buddhism” and suggested that maybe it’s time to “look around and accept that the world has changed”.
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