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Japan’s police force is set to begin a major investigation into the use of foreign casino websites by Japanese gamblers, ramping government efforts to disrupt the massive gambling segment.

The National Police Agency (NPA) will probe website operators targeting Japan-based customers to establish their identities, their locations, remittance strategies and customer volumes, as well as survey some 7,000 Japanese on online casino use, the Yomiuri Shimbun reported on Tuesday (August 20).

The move suggests that Japan’s largely hesitant response to aggressive growth in illegal online casino gambling over the past decade is showing signs of transformation, as police turn to directly investigating and possibly engaging with foreign operations.

Information collected from the investigation will be used for enforcement purposes and distributed to government ministries and agencies “as a step toward regulating access to such gambling sites and measures tackling addiction”, the daily reported.

“We will collect basic data to understand the situation as soon as possible and come up with countermeasures,” it quoted an unnamed NPA official as saying.

The Yomiuri said the NPA will also release a report of the investigation by the end of the fiscal year, or March 31, 2025.

The NPA is yet to expand on its investigations’ policy and prosecution aspects, which remain murky and inconsistent amid lawmaker reluctance to update gambling laws to incorporate internet and mobile device use.

The Japanese authorities have taken gradual steps in enforcing its message to the public that online gambling is a criminal act, despite an enduring misunderstanding that users of foreign websites, often via sophisticated affiliate networks, do not break the law.

Consumer affairs minister Taro Kono told a parliamentary committee in May 2023 that he asked several Cabinet-level departments to consider blocking casino websites, one of the earliest attempts to reckon with explosive growth in Japanese traffic to overseas operations.

Since then, most of the more conspicuous enforcement against online gambling has targeted parlour activity and payments channels, following a notorious case involving payments companies and misappropriated public money used for gambling.

More recently, a local mahjong website was busted in February in the first case of its kind, resulting in the arrests of a US national and six Japanese.

The NPA now releases for online gambling, recording 127 suspects in 2021, 59 suspects in 2022 and 107 suspects last year.

The Yomiuri reported on Tuesday that only 32 of the 107 suspects in 2023 allegedly used smartphone or other personal devices to gamble, although this figure was up from one suspect in 2022.

The NPA has now acknowledged that such data on individual gambling is “only the tip of the iceberg”, the newspaper said.

However, details of the suspects and their circumstances are so sparse, including the number of cases and judicial outcomes, that it has proven difficult to build a larger picture on police strategy and the legal terrain facing those under investigation.