Online Casinos: Spread of Gambling among Minors is Serious Problem

Editorial

15:26 JST, December 15, 2025

There has been a series of cases in which police took action because minors allegedly gambled through online casinos. Young people are particularly susceptible to gambling addiction. Children and others must be protected by severing their connections to casinos.

Since February, the Metropolitan Police Department has referred to prosecutors or notified child consultation centers about 15 people, in Tokyo and nine prefectures, aged 13 to 21 on suspicion of charges such as habitual gambling. All are suspected of having gambled at online casinos using cryptocurrency assets.

Nine of the 15 people were junior high or high school students. A first-year junior high school boy’s smartphone indicated that he had placed 7,000 bets, for a total of ¥7 million, over a period of just seven months. The boy reportedly started gambling when he was in the sixth grade of elementary school.

A first-year high school boy in Sendai was arrested by the MPD on suspicion of fraudulently obtaining cash through a so-called romance scam, in which victims are lured into romantic relations, in order to obtain money for online gambling.

The boy allegedly posed as a woman and swindled more than 30 men out of a total of more than ¥5 million, of which he spent several million yen on casinos.

Gambling is prohibited in Japan except for government-authorized activities such as horse racing and keirin bicycle racing. Online casinos that are legally operated overseas are also illegal in Japan if used from this country.

The spread of online casino gambling among minors is extremely serious. It is simply astonishing that even elementary school students have been able to access casinos.

People get interested in casinos through ads, purchase cryptocurrency from illegal operators and become addicted to gambling. They commit another crime to obtain money for betting more. This vicious cycle must be broken.

An estimated 3.37 million people in Japan have used online casinos. Among them, 180,000 people, or 5.3% of the total, are aged 10 to 19, and nearly 70% of that group said they knew they were addicted to gambling.

Online casinos are accessible around the clock via smartphones and tend to readily induce addiction. The risk is believed to be high for children, whose brains are still developing, so their control over their own actions has not fully developed yet.

To prevent the proliferation of online casino use among minors, it is essential to create an environment that prevents them from accessing casinos in the first place.

Systems that allow guardians to prevent children from viewing certain sites and set screen time limits for them on smartphones are likely to be effective. It is also vital for guardians to know in advance the sites their children gain access to.

An expert panel of the Internal Affairs and Communications Ministry has been discussing measures to prevent the use of illegal online casinos. It is hoped that the panel will work out effective measures, including the option of forcibly blocking illegal access to certain sites.

 (From The Yomiuri Shimbun, Dec. 14, 2025)