Gambling away their future

The case of a young couple who were trapped – and couldn’t get out.

From Murugesan Sinnandavar

They were a young married couple in their thirties. The husband was an engineer, and the wife a teacher. Both were earning well. They had no children.

However, seated across the table, they both looked distressed and haggard. Both were heavy in debt, and at a loss as to how to come out of it.

They had exhausted all goodwill of friends and relatives by borrowing and not paying back. All credit cards and bank loans had been maxed out.

They were literally hiding from their relatives, friends and money lenders. On the surface of it, they did not have any bad habits that could have brought them into this situation. What then was the cause?

Gambling, or more precisely, online gambling.

Without his wife’s knowledge, the husband had been gambling away their savings and their future. Seated in the living room, ostensibly on social media on his phone, the husband was busy gambling.

The wife only knew about it when relatives and money lenders started calling her and rude comments appeared on her Facebook. She tried to help by borrowing, and fell into debt, too.

Apparently, these gambling websites pop up whenever one surfs the internet. These are probably sites of a dubious nature.

An initial free credit is given and the user can try his luck immediately. However, I was puzzled as to how the husband ran up debts of up to hundreds of thousands of ringgit if he was just gambling a few ringgit at a time.

Therein lies the trap. Upon losing, the user is kept hooked by an immediate offer of a loan with interest from a different website. Keen to quickly recover what was lost, the gambler accepts it but soon finds himself in an inescapable quicksand of high-interest debts.

This is not an isolated story. More and more Malaysians are becoming hooked on online gambling and are silently ruining their lives.

True, the gambler is at fault. However, the problem is spreading far and wide and is ruining more and more families, and it needs the government’s attention.

The mighty internet genie has granted us access to everything, both good and bad. Gamblers of yesteryears need to drive up to Genting or huddle together in an illegal gambling den, always in fear of a police raid.

Family members were able to detect this gambling habit and could intervene early. However, the internet has removed that physical limitation.

Now, seated in an office, a living room or while commuting even, gamblers can gamble away their family fortune without the knowledge of their loved ones, until it is too late.

While victims of online scams scream about it and lodge police reports, victims of online gambling suffer in silence.

Who else can they blame but themselves? Hence, the problem has remained under the surface of public attention and has not been discussed.

This problem is cancerous to the nation and needs government intervention.

For a start, the government needs to create an awareness that this problem exists and warn citizens on the dangers of online gambling, similar to how awareness campaigns on online scams are being run.

Next, the digital ministry must find ways to identify and shut down or deny access to these sites – just as it does for pornographic sites.

However,this would only be a stop gap measure. Why give the operators a free hand if the government can make it difficult for them?

Long term, the government needs to address the issue and look into regulating it if they can’t curb it totally – just like how the government is regulating lotteries at present. Right now, this problem is under the radar and is being ignored.

However, in order to do any of the above or take some other long term measures, the government needs to first acknowledge the issue and start a conversation about it.

We can’t go on ignoring the problem just because it has not slapped us in the face. It is a cancer that is spreading under the skin and must be dealt with, sooner rather than later.

The government must address this issue, now.

Murugesan Sinnandavar is a lawyer and an FMT reader.

The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of FMT.

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