Indonesia moves to block 33,252 bank accounts in latest online gambling crackdown

Indonesia’s financial authorities have stepped up their anti-online gambling campaign by ordering enhanced due diligence and the blocking of 33,252 bank accounts suspected of links to illegal betting activity, as the country widens its financial and digital enforcement strategy.

Indonesia’s Financial Services Authority, OJK, said in its March 2026 monthly board press release that it has instructed banks to carry out enhanced due diligence and-or block 33,252 accounts suspected of being tied to online gambling. The regulator also noted that this marked an increase from the previous figure of about 32,556 accounts, showing that the latest move is part of a continuing escalation rather than a one-off action.

The account crackdown sits inside a broader anti-money-laundering framework. OJK has repeatedly linked online gambling to financial crime risk and has pushed banks to strengthen transaction monitoring, reduce account trading, improve small-value transaction detection and use web-crawling and IT tools to identify suspect flows more quickly. Earlier OJK guidance also made clear that, where enhanced due diligence confirms serious violations, banks may go beyond temporary restrictions and move toward blacklisting customers from opening new accounts.

The wider state response has also expanded well beyond the banking system. Indonesia’s Communication and Digital Affairs Ministry has treated online gambling as a large-scale digital threat, saying it had already taken down more than 2.45 million gambling-related sites and pieces of content in a short crackdown phase in late 2025, while its monitoring directorate says more than 7.8 million gambling-related digital contents had been blocked between 2021 and 29 March 2026. That suggests Jakarta is trying to squeeze both access and payment channels at the same time.

Financial intelligence bodies are adding further weight to that campaign. Public statements citing PPATK data say the value of online gambling transactions in 2025 fell to around Rp155tn, down 57% from 2024, even though the overall scale of the market remains enormous. Separate official remarks have also described online gambling as closely tied to money laundering and broader organised digital crime, helping explain why the government increasingly frames the issue as more than a moral or consumer-protection matter.

The significance of the 33,252-account figure therefore lies not only in the size of the banking intervention, but in what it says about Indonesia’s policy direction. The country is moving toward a more integrated enforcement model in which regulators, banks, financial intelligence units and digital authorities work in parallel to cut off gambling infrastructure. If that coordination continues to deepen, Indonesia’s campaign could become one of the more aggressive anti-online-betting enforcement programs in the region.