The 'Contactless' Trend Hits the Horse Racing Industry... Korea Racing Authority Establishes Addiction Counseling Centers at All Business Sites

[Image source=Yonhap News]

[Asia Economy Sejong=Reporter Kim Hyewon] The COVID-19 pandemic has brought a wave of 'contactless' trends to the horse racing industry as well. The addiction treatment institutions operated by the Korea Racing Authority (KRA) have established contactless counseling, and a data-driven illegal horse racing crackdown system has also been developed.

According to the KRA on the 16th, the country's first specialized counseling institution for gambling addiction, the 'YouCan Center,' has been installed at all KRA business sites. To enhance counseling accessibility during the no-spectator horse racing period caused by COVID-19, 18 additional YouCan Centers were established nationwide.

The YouCan Center introduced new contactless counseling channels. Staff were reinforced to activate basic counseling through KakaoTalk chatbots, phone calls, chats, and emails, and a menu for preventing overindulgence was added to the horse racing betting ticket purchase application (app). Additionally, a new video counseling system was launched to enable contactless counseling with professional counselors. A KRA official stated, "The proportion of contactless counseling increased by 38.2 percentage points compared to 2019, and the number of participants in addiction prevention campaigns approached about 40,000, producing meaningful results."

The prolonged COVID-19 pandemic caused side effects such as the expansion of the illegal horse racing market. In response, the KRA focused on strengthening online, data-driven illegal crackdown systems. They independently developed a data-based automatic search and extraction program for illegal horse racing sites and collaborated with the Korea Internet & Security Agency to apply a method of finding and reporting site URLs in gambling spam messages to block illegal betting sites. As a result, 10,118 illegal betting sites were shut down last year, an 87% increase compared to 5,407 cases in 2019.

Finally, the KRA made efforts to strengthen the will to execute a company-wide soundness vision and strategy to establish an effective soundness system. They reviewed soundness promotion projects quarterly and held a 'Soundness Council' composed of external experts at the end of the year to objectively collect and listen to opinions on the soundness promotion performance so far. Reflecting public surveys, employee feedback, and external expert opinions, they supplemented the existing soundness promotion system and established a new mid-to-long-term soundness policy (2022?2024) with the new vision of "Safe and Sound Horse Racing Loved by the People."

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.