With a number of disturbing cases of people either committing suicide or murder, related to online gambling across Indonesia, President Joko Widodo has announced a new crackdown on the illicit activity.
In what followed the COVID-19 pandemic, after mass unemployment, an increasing number of people hope to gain something more amidst their increasing financial constraints.
As a result, money that should have been used for buying food and milk for children, is diverted to top up their online gambling accounts.
What's even more concerning is that many housewives are also involved in online gambling. From the comfort of their homes, women use their smartphones to play online slot machines, poker and more. And not just that, because there are also quite a few elementary school children who are engaged in online gambling.
This is a worrisome situation for all parties involved because gambling in general always lead to significant social harms and economic losses.
Following a 2023 state-emergency on online gambling, Jokowi, who will relinquish power to president-elect Prabowo Subianto in October, urged Indonesians to avoid entanglement in any form of gambling.
"The government is making serious efforts to combat and eradicate online gambling. We have taken down 2.1 million gambling websites so far," the president said in the video posted on the State Secretariat's YouTube account.
"The task force on online gambling will soon be established to accelerate our efforts to eradicate online gambling, which is transnational, cross-border, and cross-authority by nature," he added.
In a video message, the president announced that his government is establishing a dedicated task force against online gambling to expedite operations.
According to the Minister of Communication and Informatics Budi Arie Setiadi, he referred to online gambling as an activity that is "sucking the people's blood dry."
"We're waging a universal war against online gambling," he said.
"Online gambling is so concerning," adding that the "phenomenon is just the tip of the iceberg."
By cracking down online gambling, not only that the government is able to block if not terminate some millions of websites, but also frozen thousands of bank accounts related to the activity.
The government knew that blocking websites is not enough to tackle this problem, and that additional action is needed.
By identifying key accounts, tracing where the money flows allow the government to know who are involved in this illicit activity, and block their back accounts to prevent the funding of the channels.
This way, the government hopes that gambling transactions can be suppressed.
While the minister is doing what it can to trace financial accounts used to deposit online gambling transactions, the authority is partnering with Bank Indonesia (BI) and the Financial Services Authority (OJK) to block financial accounts associated with the activity.
According to report, most of the servers used by gambling sites originate from Cambodia, and that thousands of Indonesians are working there to operate them, Budi said, without immediately providing evidence.
It's said that the largest population that is addicted to online gambling in Indonesia, comes from lower income group.
And this addiction to online gambling is hurting them on a long run, especially in terms of productivity, which traps them into poverty.
Officials have also blamed online gambling addiction for rising crime in some urban and rural areas, a higher divorce rate, and a rise in Indonesians taking out high-interest loans.
But the issue goes way beyond people's well-being, because people are also dying because of this activity.
A week before this, a young Indonesian policewoman set her husband on fire due to his gambling addiction, saying that her husband's addiction left the family struggling financially, according to media reports.
Months before that, the military said one of its officers had committed suicide due to mounting online gambling-related debts.
In Indonesia, the world's largest Muslim-majority nation, gambling of all form is prohibited.
But ironically, in 2023, more than 3 million Indonesians were engaged in the activity, which was estimated to be worth nearly $20 billion, or about 1.5% of gross domestic product, government data showed.
"Don’t engage in gambling, either offline or online. If you have spare money, save it or use it to start a business," Jokowi said.
He warned that what is at stake in gambling is not just money, but also “your future and that of your family and children."