Jack Hammer 4 Chasing The Dragon

About Jack Hammer 4 Chasing The Dragon

“You can try to stop gambling, but then you go onto foreign gambling sites and crypto casinos and they keep appearing,” Madsen says.

He began watching regulators shut down individual gambling sites, only for mirror sites, cloned domains and replacement URLs to emerge in thier place. The problem, he concluded, was not necessarily the individual website. It was the network behind it.

“Why not use the dataset I already have on gambling sites to map the most problematic ones, identify how they are connected and build a deeper picture of the networks behind them?” That thought process eventually gave birth to Trace2Trace.

About Jack Hammer 4 Chasing The Dragon

Under Section 106 of New Zealand’s Gambling Act 2003, a class 4 licence holder, also known as a “corporate society” by the regulator, “must apply or distribute the net proceeds from class 4 gambling only to or for an authorised purpose specified in the corporate society’s licence”.

The DIA worked directly with class 4 gambling operators (commonly known as pokies trusts), and discovered ‘widespread issues’ such as cases where money that should have been available for community grants was instead spent on society expenses, such as the purchase of additional gaming machines.

Vicki Scott, the DIA’s director of gambling, said the investigation had delivered significant results, while stressing that work to improve compliance and ensure communities received their share of gambling proceeds would continue.

What is Jack Hammer 4 Chasing The Dragon?

A systemic policy cooperation mechanism is expected, targeting youth gambling prevention and student safeguarding. Rather than implementing short-term campaigns, the focus will be on embedding gambling prevention into everyday school routines. 

It will include combining restrictions on smartphone use with engaging RAS activities to effectively block and fill the time students might otherwise spend being exposed to gambling content.

At the signing ceremony, Gyeonggi education chief An Min-seok emphasised the immediacy of the issue: “To effectively respond to youth gambling problems, close cooperation between the Office of Education, which best understands the school environment, and specialised prevention and treatment institutions is necessary.