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Some 2 percent of the Japanese population, or just under 2m people, are currently engaged in online gambling, with a majority of them claiming to have a gambling addiction, a survey commissioned by the National Police Agency (NPA) has shown.
The NPA report, released on Thursday (March 13), is the first major police-prompted survey on online gambling behaviour and comes amid a widening crackdown on the Japanese online gambling ecosystem after years of caution by enforcement organs.
Just under 60 percent of current online gamblers reported addictive behaviour, the report said, while 75 percent of users reported crossing over from free or freemium gambling sites to real-money gambling sites.
“The survey highlights the prevalence of illegal gambling, and the situation is extremely serious,” the Asahi Shimbun quoted an NPA official as saying.
The report also found that the top 10 percent of online gamblers are responsible for 70 percent of total spend of ¥1.24trn ($8.3bn), and that gamblers in their 20s and 30s claim more than two thirds of the market in terms of numbers of players.
The research found that 44 percent of respondents remain unaware that online gambling is illegal, compounded by the fact that 38 of the 40 Japan-facing gambling websites examined by the research offered no warnings in this regard.
It added that Curaçao is the host licensing authority for most of the websites, but also noted licence holders in the Comoros island of Anjouan, Costa Rica, Malta, Gibraltar, the Isle of Man and Georgia.
The research was conducted by Tokyo-based market research consultants Seed Planning, and had a sample size of 27,145 interviewees spread across all age brackets, including some 1,600 minors.
The report’s authors assumed gambling rates per age group in the sample could be extrapolated to the wider population without further demographic analysis.
Japanese police are engaged in a slow but steady crackdown on online gambling, including the arrest of more than 130 suspects in November of last year.
