Casinos are usually concerned with bringing gamblers through the door. Kangwon Land has started looking for the ones gambling elsewhere.
The South Korean operator is using Gamble Tracker, a system developed by KAIST’s Cyber Security Research Center, to identify illegal gambling websites and trace them when they reappear under new addresses.
There is an obvious irony here. Kangwon Land runs the only casino in South Korea where Korean citizens are legally allowed to gamble. It is now helping the authorities find the casinos serving those same customers illegally.
But the story is more interesting than a casino adopting a new AI tool.
Illegal gambling websites are built to disappear. A domain can be blocked and replaced, sometimes before regular users even notice. Registration pages may only appear after scripts have loaded, payment instructions can be embedded in images, and several supposedly independent brands may share the same code, advertising channels or referral system.
KAIST’s technology is designed around that behaviour. It uses static and dynamic crawling to discover websites, executes their pages to reveal hidden content, and applies optical character recognition to information stored inside images.
The aim is not simply to produce another list of URLs. Researchers are also looking for connections between sites: repeated templates, shared registration codes, similar page structures and links to the same advertising networks. Those connections can reveal when several disposable websites may belong to one organisation. KAIST Cyber Security Research Center
The technology finds something suspicious. People still have to decide what it means and what should happen next.
Korea’s legal gambling surveillance network
Kangwon Land has commercial reasons to pursue illegal casinos. They compete for Korean customers while avoiding the restrictions, taxes and responsible-gambling obligations imposed on the legal operator.
Yet protecting the business is only part of the explanation. South Korea already expects legal gambling companies to monitor illegal versions of their own products.
The National Gambling Control Commission evaluates operators partly on whether they maintain an illegal-gambling monitoring system and what results it produces. Surveillance is therefore not simply a public-relations exercise. It has become one of the responsibilities attached to operating inside the legal market. National Gambling Control Commission
The Korea Racing Authority has followed this model for years. It operates technology for detecting illegal racing sites, has exchanged knowledge with KAIST and the Hong Kong Jockey Club, and has developed tools to identify telephone numbers used by illegal bookmakers.
Its reported requests to close illegal websites increased from 12,177 to 15,345 in one year. The authority recorded 25,823 closure requests in 2025 and wants that figure to approach 30,000 by 2028. Korea Racing Authority
Seen in that context, Kangwon Land is not suddenly becoming a police agency. It is joining a system in which legal operators act as specialist observers: racing monitors illegal racing, sports betting monitors illegal bookmakers, and the country’s domestic casino monitors illegal casinos.
That arrangement makes sense until the illegal market refuses to stay inside those categories.
How the detection pipeline moves from automated discovery to human verification and enforcement referral. The unresolved challenge is connecting disposable domains to the operators, payments and promotion networks behind them.
You can block a domain, not a network
South Korea estimates that its illegal gambling market is worth KRW95.9 trillion. Against a market of that size, counting websites can only tell us so much. National Gambling Control Commission
A blocked domain may return the following day under another name. The harder and more valuable task is connecting that new address to the same operators, payment accounts, promoters and technical infrastructure.
Kangwon Land has not yet published enough information to show whether Gamble Tracker is producing those deeper results. We know it can identify suspicious sites and support blocking requests. We do not know how often its findings lead to investigations, arrests, frozen accounts or seized criminal proceeds.
That is the real test.
If the system merely helps Kangwon Land find more domains, it will make an old game of whack-a-mole slightly faster. If it helps investigators see the businesses behind those domains, the casino will have become something more unusual.
Kangwon Land is still the house. Increasingly, it is also helping to watch everyone operating outside it.
We track how money, players and regulation move across East Asia's gaming markets — including the parts that don't show up in the official figures. If that's your world, reply. The best context usually comes from comparing notes.
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East Asia Reports
Web: eastasiareports.com · Email: [email protected]
Author — Adrià Mas Rodríguez