Pagcor blocks 5,793 illegal online gaming sites

Image: INQUIRER.net stock photo

MANILA, Philippines — The Philippine Amusement and Gaming Corporation (Pagcor) on Tuesday said at least 74.78 percent, or 5,793 of the 7,747 illegal online gaming sites it has detected, have already been blocked.

Senior Vice President of Pagcor’s Security Monitoring Cluster Ret. Gen. Raul Villanueva disclosed the matter before the Senate committee on ways and means’ public hearing on the Anti-Online Gambling Act.

According to Villanueva, Pagcor has been monitoring all illegal sites — not only for illegal online games but also other classifications such as e-sabong, Facebook ads, mobile applications, offshore sites, and spam messages.

“Of these, sir, 7,747, 5,793 or 74.78 percent were already blocked, and 1,954 are still active,” said Villanueva.

The Pagcor official emphasized how challenging it is to block these sites, explaining that they usually resort to two strategies: blocking the website or URLs and payment blocking.

“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. 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 publish or publish in our websites only the illegal sites,” he explained.

While it is a challenge to eradicate illegal gambling sites, Villanueva said Pagcor is doing its best to monitor the internet.

To further support their bid, the Pagcor official said they have also reached out to Google Play and Apple Play Store, specifically requesting that illegal applications such as e-sabong sites be shut down.

READ: Pagcor profits P6.56B in first half of 2024

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