South Korea: all our coverage

Malacañang has asked the Department of Foreign Affairs to look at whether January's visa-free scheme for Chinese visitors is being used to staff illegal offshore gaming and scam hubs. It is a review, not a decision, and the scheme was due one before it expires anyway.

Police in South Chungcheong say they have dismantled the top of a pyramid that bought live casino feeds and game credits from overseas game companies, built sites in minutes and leased them to operators from offices in Vietnam and Cambodia. The companies, described as operating legally abroad, are not named.

Grand Korea Leisure's president put a number on the Osaka threat at the National Assembly this week, then corrected it: about a quarter of its Japanese revenue, or 5% to 10% of the total. An industry study presented the same day put the hit to Korea's foreigner-only casinos far higher.

Kangwon Land has no limit on how often a casino member's points card can be replaced, and says it cannot check replacement records against its misuse records, according to data released by a lawmaker during the National Assembly's audit season. The worry is "comp-kkang", the resale of casino points for cash that goes back into gambling.

Yonhap, citing an unnamed source, says Grand Korea Leisure's marketing staff and executives have been meeting customers in Hong Kong, Macau, Singapore and Mongolia without proper legal review, 11 years after Chinese police arrested Korean casino staff for recruiting gamblers. GKL says its staff serve existing customers and recruit no one.

Data obtained by an opposition lawmaker show Kangwon Land's slot machine manufacturing business has run at a loss every year since 2020, while a Philippine sales office that cost about ₩700 million found no new distributors. The losses total about $11.1 million, not the $236 million some English-language reports have carried.

A month after taking office, Kangwon Land's first permanent chief executive since 2023 has set up a committee to diagnose the company and test the feasibility of its flagship resort plan. The review lands while the only casino open to Koreans is waiting on Seoul for the exemptions the plan depends on.

Paradise Co's four foreigner-only casinos took more in the third quarter than in any quarter before it, even though customers bought fewer chips than in the second. Grand Korea Leisure recovered in September, but its quarter was barely ahead of last year's.

Lotte Tour Development drew a record 66,393 casino visitors to Jeju Dream Tower in September and kept the smallest share of their table play in almost three years. Its two listed rivals grew in the same month, and the company is calling it a run of bad luck that October will correct.

Korean casino operators can now borrow from the state tourism fund to build or expand, not just to cover running costs. The loans arrive as the government moves to raise the casino levy ceiling by half and make licences renewable every five years, and the industry is asking whether the carrot comes before the stick.

A survey of 1,929 adults aged 18 to 35 in the Daegu region found that money trouble was linked to gambling harm through depressive symptoms and low self-control, and that the depression link held under two different models. The authors want both screened together.

Police data supplied to a National Assembly member show the Gangwon provincial cyber unit has booked 26 users of the blocked platform for gambling under Article 246 of the Criminal Act and referred 18 of them for prosecution. One trader alone put about KRW 5.7bn through the site. The defendants say a yes-or-no contract settled on a blockchain is a derivative, not a bet, and the courts have not yet been asked.

Casino revenue fell 11.3% year on year. The drop, which is what customers actually handed over, rose 7.2%. The whole decline is hold, not demand.

South Korea's stock market has been dramatically supercharged this month, ascending to become Asia’s best-performing market in the first half of 2025. This