{"id":136115,"date":"2026-08-29T10:34:31","date_gmt":"2026-08-29T10:34:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/136115\/"},"modified":"2026-08-29T10:34:31","modified_gmt":"2026-08-29T10:34:31","slug":"how-the-philippines-missed-a-korean-gambling-racket-worth-us3-8-billion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/136115\/","title":{"rendered":"How the Philippines missed a Korean gambling racket worth US$3.8 billion"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Philippines<\/a> spent years dismantling Chinese-linked gambling compounds in dramatic, headline-grabbing raids.<\/p>\n

But all the while, and with far less scrutiny, South Korean syndicates were building a parallel industry worth billions of US dollars \u2013 one that a spate of recent arrests suggests is still very much intact.<\/p>\n

The most recent involved a 29-year-old Korean woman named Kim Young-sun, who authorities allege ran a network of 23 illegal online betting websites out of offices in Pasay and Quezon City that raked in an estimated 5.33 trillion won (US$3.8 billion) between November 2018 and this year.<\/p>\n

Her arrest, announced on Monday, offered a rare glimpse into an underworld that has apparently thrived for years in the shadow of the much louder scandal surrounding Chinese-linked Philippine offshore gaming operators, or Pogos<\/a>.For almost a decade, Pogos dominated the headlines. Compounds linked to Chinese syndicates were exposed for human trafficking<\/a>, torture and fraud on a scale so shocking it triggered a congressional inquiry, presidential intervention and, eventually, a permanent ban<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But while investigators trained their attention on those operations, an analogous Korean criminal economy was expanding largely unnoticed. Kim\u2019s arrest and a related case unsealed by police in Seoul just weeks earlier suggest this economy had grown far larger than most realised.<\/p>\n

\"KimKim Young-sun is accused of running a network of 23 illegal online betting websites in the Philippines. Photo: Handout<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Philippines spent years dismantling Chinese-linked gambling compounds in dramatic, headline-grabbing raids. But all the while, and with…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":136116,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[69115,134,21194,7030,13878,28653,4118,45046,171,28032,69116,52841,2631,69114,69117,1484,69118],"class_list":["post-136115","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-korea","tag-bamban","tag-china","tag-chinese","tag-crime","tag-duterte","tag-gambling","tag-interpol-red-notice","tag-kim-young-sun","tag-korean","tag-manila","tag-pasay","tag-philippine","tag-philippines","tag-pogos","tag-quezon-city","tag-south-korean","tag-tarlac"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136115","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=136115"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136115\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/136116"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=136115"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=136115"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=136115"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}