Jakarta raid on foreign nationals raises questions over gambling ring financiers

JAKARTA - Questions are mounting over the key figure behind the sponsorship of a Jakarta-based online gambling network, following last week’s raid that uncovered hundreds of foreigners operating across 75 domains and gambling websites from an office building in the heart of a business district in West Jakarta.

Lawmakers have urged the National Police to deepen their investigation into the network’s funding flows as investigators are scrambling to find the financiers behind the gambling ring.

“It is impossible for more than 300 foreign nationals to operate without powerful actors backing them, and there are strong indicators of local network involvement,” deputy chair of the House of Representatives Commission III overseeing law enforcement, Mr Ahmad Sahroni, said on May 11, as quoted by Antara.

Together with the Financial Transaction Reports and Analysis Center (PPATK), the police must work to dismantle these networks down to their roots and ensure there is no impunity in holding those responsible to account, regardless of the perpetrators’ nationalities, Mr Sahroni went on to say.

Concerns are growing that online gambling and cyber scam operations, once concentrated in mainland Southeast Asia such as Cambodia, Myanmar, Laos and Vietnam, are relocating after crackdowns there, with recent raids pointing to an increasingly entrenched presence in Indonesia.

The May 7 raid at Hayam Wuruk Plaza Tower, an office building in the crowded Hayam Wuruk business and retail district, has raised alarm that these networks are operating in plain sight among legitimate businesses, rather than in more isolated hubs seen in places like Cambodia’s Sihanoukville city where such operations have typically been concentrated away from the general population.

Police arrested 321 foreigners, mainly from Vietnam, in the raid and seized phones, passports, laptops, computers and cash in multiple currencies.

In a press briefing over the weekend, director of general crimes Brigadier-General Wira Satya Triputra of the National Police’s Criminal Investigation Department (Bareskrim) said the police have continued to interrogate those arrested to gather more information on the gambling ring.

Investigators are also running a digital forensic investigation, tracing financial flows and tracking server and IP addresses to identify the sponsors who brought the alleged perpetrators to Indonesia, he said.

The police, according to Gen Wira, were also planning to summon the owner of the Hayam Wuruk Plaza Tower as investigators zero in on the possible involvement of an Indonesian national in facilitating the two month-old illegal gambling operation.

“We are conducting a joint operation with relevant ministries to investigate the building’s owner, including identifying who leased the premises and who provided the equipment used for the online gambling activities... The building was rented on a one-year lease,” Gen Wira said in the livestreamed briefing.

“We remain committed to pursuing the case further up the chain. At this stage, those detained are only at the coordinator level, based on the roles they played in the operation,” he added.

Among those working together with the police is the Immigration and Corrections Ministry, which on May 10 confirmed it was tracing “the sponsors or guarantors” who enabled these foreign nationals to operate in the country.

It was the second crackdown on a large group of foreigners in a week.

On May 6, immigration officers arrested 210 foreign nationals, mostly from Vietnam and China, accused of running investment scams from an apartment building in Batam, Riau Islands.

Like many South-east Asian countries, Indonesia has for years grappled with the rise of online gambling operations and cyber scams, multibillion-dollar illegal industries that expanded rapidly during Covid-19 and have since inflicted billions of dollars in losses across the region, exploiting weak enforcement, cross-border gaps and vulnerable populations.

While ASEAN has stepped up its efforts to combat the trend through regional action plans and cross-border law enforcement cooperation, progress has been mostly uneven, with coordination hindered by differing legal systems and enforcement gaps. THE JAKARTA POST/ASIA NEWS NETWORK