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29 arrested in illegal online horse racing betting ring

Published: 25 Sep. 2025, 16:35 Updated: 25 Sep. 2025, 18:53

The website for an illegal horse racing gambling site [SCREEN CAPTURE]

A crime ring that operated an illegal horse racing betting website by using stolen live race footage from the Korea Racing Authority (KRA) has been busted by the police.

The Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency said on Thursday it apprehended 29 people, including operators of the site, on charges including violations of KRA-related laws that ban unauthorized gambling. Six of them were taken into custody.

The group is accused of running the site and managing gambling funds worth some 170 billion won ($121.4 million) from December 2022 to November 2024 by streaming real-time KRA races.

The operators paid about 2 million won per month to an illegal video vendor in China to obtain the KRA's live broadcasts, police said. The KRA officially sells its live race footage to 24 countries, but police suspect the footage was leaked from one of those legal streams and resold to the Chinese vendor.

Initially based in Ilsan, Gyeonggi, the operators allegedly relocated to Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam two years ago to avoid domestic crackdowns and continued to run the site.

Investigators said the group recruited gamblers through referrals from a horse racing YouTuber with about 10,000 subscribers and through random texted advertisements. The operators allegedly partnered with a gang-run network that handled deposits and withdrawals of gambling funds, paying commissions of 0.3 to 1 percent.

Police also charged 140 of the site’s 17,795 members, all of whom had wagered large bets of more than 5 million won each, with gambling offenses. Among them was another horse racing YouTuber accused of placing 214 million won across 116 bets. Authorities have frozen 540 million won of criminal proceeds pending trial.

The police said they began investigating the ring in cooperation with the KRA in June last year after receiving intelligence. To avoid detection, the group frequently changed burner phones and opened so-called “front accounts” under borrowed names to handle payments.

“All online horse racing websites other than the official KRA service are illegal, and users may be prosecuted for gambling,” a police official warned.

This article was originally written in Korean and translated by a bilingual reporter with the help of generative AI tools. It was then edited by a native English-speaking editor. All AI-assisted translations are reviewed and refined by our newsroom.
BY KIM JEONG-JAE [[email protected]]