Corruption of gaming age

November 7th, 2005 Jun Sok Huhh Posted in news |

Corruption of the official, especially policeman, is not new to any human society. With respect to the corruption of government, Korea is not so clean, but fairly transparent compared with other developing countries. Anyway, this post is not about corruption in general, but this special case in Korea.

A police lieutenant in charge of cyber-crime team was arrested for operating illegal online gambling web-site. According to the prosecutor concerned, the lieutenant had invested 400,000 dollar and set up an online gambling service for real money. In Korea, real money transaction for any kind of gambling is strictly prohibited. By the annoucement of prosecutor, the revenue of this web-site amounts to 9,500,000 dollar by this year. The lieutenant also disturbed investigations by other parts of police, saying that his part also had engaged in the case.

I think this type of corruption is a little bit interesting. Most of cyber-crimes in Korea are related with real money. Item trading fraud is one of them. Online gambling with real money transaction has been prohibited, but practiced widely in cyberspace in numerous manners. Maybe, the lieutenant had the best position to catch its deep and inner technique to make money. So, the temptation to get in there was hardly resistable.

Is this a frontier of corruption at the age of online gaming?