Kim Hyun-cheol
Staff Reporter
A lottery ticket shop in Sangye-dong, northern Seoul, is flooded with customers everyday. The store, which has produced an unprecedented 10 first-prize lotto winners so far, is already super famous among the country's bonanza chasers.
These days, it has become a bigger business. Every week, some 40,000 people visit there to buy 200 million won ($147,000) worth of lotto tickets in total, the nation's highest grossing lottery ticket outlet.
"A lot of lotto buyers come from outside of Seoul. The customer base is different now. They used to be mainly older men, but now even housewives frequent here," the shop owner said. Sales here soared over 20 percent since September, when the domestic economic slowdown began to deepen.
It has always been seen as a "guilty pleasure." This year, however, is witnessing a new era of gambling in South Korea on the back of the ongoing economic slump.
The desire to win the jackpot appears to be shared by most people in the country, according to a recent poll.
Over 60 percent of employees said they have recently bought a lottery ticket, online recruiter JobKorea said last week in a survey of 1,213 office workers. Also, 40 percent said they are now buying lotto tickets more frequently than before.
Lottery ticket sales are actually on a steep rise. Since June, they gained more than 4 percent from the previous year, according to Nanum Lotto, the nation's biggest lottery operator. The figure constantly fell over 10 percent annually from 2003 to 2007, and also lowered year-on-year this year until May.
The upswing is common for the entire gambling industry. It earned 14.6 trillion won last year, growing nearly 2.5 times bigger than 6 trillion won in 2000.
The Korea Racing Association, a state-run horseracing operator which accounted for 45 percent of the annual gambling sales here in 2007, expects a 13 percent growth this year at 7.4 trillion won. Even sports bets have benefited, with Sports Toto making a 77 billion won net profit last year.
Elsewhere, Kangwon Land, the nation's only casino for local people, posted a record-high net profit of 96.5 billion won in the third quarter of the year. Its visitors also grew 19.1 percent by October, amounting to 2.4 million.
It surely is a remarkable success in terms of business. However, what is worrisome is the industry, which grows on the darker side of society, always leaves room for the spawning of an "illegal" monster.
Signs of the side effects are already showing. The National Police Agency closed down a total of 729 illegal gaming Web sites in a month-long intense crackdown, which started Oct. 18. However, the number is not even close to the overall number of gambling dens on the Internet.
There were over 1,600 Korean gambling Web sites as of the end of last year, according to the data of the Korea Information Society Development Institute (KISDI). Now the number is assessed to be even bigger, but the exact figure is currently not available.
Some negative statistics are accordingly growing. The KISDI data also indicates the country's prevalence of gambling addiction is now 9.5 percent, much higher than that of advanced countries.
Also, the crime rate grew to 30 percent last year, more than doubling from 14.3 percent in 2000, around local casinos, the National Gaming Control Commission said Wednesday.