Gambling and Internet Cafes!

I refer to your report, Gambling using their PTPTN loans, in which was stated, " The gambling activities among the students are reported to be rampant due to an increase of gambling slot machines outlets near the students’ housing area in Taman Cempaka and Rokam in Ipoh..... A check found that at least five Internet cafes had hundreds of such machines. The two most famous machines were the Funky Monkey and the Kimochi....."

Throughout the years, we have read that the Police have made intermittent raids on such gambling joints masquerading as Internet Cafes, and according the the above report, without any significant success! The problem needs to be nipped at the bud, and to do so, we must now ask the questions to the Local Authorities. 

As far as I can remember, licences to operate the so-called Internet Cafes arose in the days when accessing the Internet was difficult and very limited. Internet cafes mushroomed to take advantage of the business opportunity of providing internet access to the masses at an affordable cost.

Today, the Internet is accessible to almost everyone with a phone, and data packages, free WiFi  are all over the place. Retirees and bored housewives think nothing of surfing the net while waiting for their spouses or grandchildren. Children as young as 5 years old can surf the world wide web, sometimes with deleterious consequences such as porn watching and illicit gambling activities.

So, do the Internet Cafes now serve their original purpose? In order to survive, they have mutated to become places that initially offered innocent Internet Games, but the inevitable has happened. The Internet Cafe is now seen as the place where the young and bored can get their dose of surreptitious gambling, to catastrophic effects!

The Local authorities need to revise its terms of operating such cafes, the first of which is to make such cares an OPEN environment where is operations are easily subject to public scrutiny. Why should the cafes be allowed to operate behind closed doors, in dimmed light conditions, and even with CCTV posted outside the premises, to warn of raids by the Police? Why should Internet Cafes hide themselves behind tinted glass fronts, which only allow people to look out, not in? Do the operators of such cafes post bonds or deposits to ensure they abide by the rules not to offer gambling terminals?

From my long term observation, it  would seem to me that the authorities are ''closing one eye" to this in return for revenue received annually from licensing. Licensing such an "ambiguous" business is also an area that can be open to lots of corruption.

Finally, I would like to describe the operations of a 'half shop' internet cafe in my Section. This shop appears to be shuttered all the time, as if it's vacant, but a CCTV mounted on the ceiling outside the shop monitors all entry and departures. Customers can be seen going in and out of the shuttered place, and even food is served from the Indian restaurant next door.! What seems to be ludicrous is that sometime back, there was even an "umbrella" police post stationed just 5 metres on the road opposite the shuttered place! Lastly, I am not even sure this 'Internet cafe' is licensed !!
 Dubious Internet Cafes getting away with it.