PAGCOR says 5,793 illegal online gaming sites blocked

Philippine gaming regulator PAGCOR said Tuesday that it has detected a total of 7,747 illegal online gaming sites, of which 5,793 or almost 75% have already been blocked.

As reported by the Inquirer, the update was provided by PAGCOR’s Senior Vice President of Security Monitoring Cluster, Ret. Gen. Raul Villanueva, during an appearance at the Senate committee on ways and means’ public hearing on the Anti-Online Gambling Act.

Villanueva explained that the regulator has been monitoring illegal gambling sites as well as e-sabong, facebook ads, mobile applications, offshore sites and spam messages, with around 1,954 of the 7,747 sites detected still active.

He also noted that blocking all sites remained challenging, particularly in regards to interrupting payment processing.

“The payment blocking as of now based on my research, there’s no studies yet on payment blocking because some of these criminals use crypto currency as a mode of payment,” he said. “And the banking system is very complex, offshore banking is very complex. But we [have reached] out to payment portals like GCash and Maya, and we had a meeting two weeks ago with a representative of Gcash and they promised us to purge on these illegal sites because we have submitted to them or have published on our websites only the illegal sites.

Villanueva said it has also reached out Google Play and Apple Play Store to request they help shut down illegal sites.

“If you will look, there was a reduction in facebook ads, especially illegal sabong, because of these efforts that we’ve been doing,” he said. “But they shifted to chat rooms like Telegram chatgroups and they’ve been advertising and posting links on illegal sites.”

Online gaming and specifically the Philippines’ offshore gaming industry has been in the crosshairs of late amid a spate of recent raids on illegal POGO (Philippine Offshore Gaming Operators) hubs found to have been engaging in serious illegal activities.

PAGCOR has also been working to clean up the offshore gaming industry, reducing the number of licenses issued under its revised IGL (Internet Gaming Licencees) scheme from almost 300 to just 43.