Filipinos Are Addicted to Online Gambling. So Is Their Government

In the mountainous, landlocked Benguet province of the Philippines, 22-year-old college student Carl Genesis Contero died by suicide in August after losing hundreds of dollars, including his school tuition, to online gambling. Contero, who was studying to be a police officer, left behind a five-page note apologizing to his family and pleading for the government to ban online betting, his mother says. Hundreds of miles away in the southern province of Bukidnon, 26-year-old gasoline station worker Brayan Concha took his life earlier in the summer after running up his own debt. “I thought he was just betting small amounts through his e-wallet,” says his cousin Antonio. In fact, he’d run up 42,000 pesos ($735) in debt—more than four times the monthly minimum wage in his province.

Most countries in Southeast Asia have never legalized online betting, but not the Philippines. Since the pandemic, internet gambling has proliferated across the archipelagic nation, surpassing Singapore last year to become Asia’s second-largest gambling hub after Macau. Almost half of the Philippines’ 69 million-person working-age population is registered on smartphone apps that offer slot machines, live carnival games and sports betting, an exponential rise from less than half a million users in 2018. The expanding orbit of internet casinos is noticeable from the busy streets of the capital, Manila, to quiet agricultural towns on southern islands, with public-transport drivers, security guards and college students all constantly glued to their phones, tracking their wins and—more often—their losses.