Online casinos like land casinos have a specific age you have to be in order to open an account.  For online casinos you generally have to be eighteen years or older.  A sixteen year old found a way around this little hiccup recently.  Police just discovered this high school student opened a bank account in an adult’s name.  Using this name he signed up for an online casino.

The student stated that he wanted to bet in online casinos games, as well as bicycle and boat races.  This particular student was located in Tokyo.  The student was found trying to transfer funds from the online casino to the bank account, and then to himself.  The activities looked suspect to the police.  They decided to look further and found out how the student managed to open the bank account.

The student bought an ID and password for a web bank account.  He bought the ID for a 41 year old housewife.  The sale of the information cost him 17,000 yen.  This sale occurred in August.  Basically the student went online saying he would purchase a bank account from sellers by posting on a bulletin board online.  In the ad he stated he would pay 10,000 yen for the information.

It was before this though that the student signed up for an online casino.  In July of 2007 he used his mother’s credit card to open up the account.  During this time he was able to rack up 1.3 million yen.  The student made even more of a mess by stating that he would sell bank accounts to people.  He defrauded these people for 70,000 yen.  The idea for getting his own bank account and then using it in the online casino came about because he had almost run out of money.

Most of the online casinos are regulated to catch such fraud; however in Japan online casinos are just now becoming legal.  There have been several fraudulent online casinos offering the games to locals.

The illegal online casino action is part of the reason land casinos in Japan have begun to open their own online casinos.  They want to offer a place for online gamblers to play that will be safe.  It will hopefully cut out issues like the above, where a student gets an idea to make money.  At the very least, Japan is hoping the more regulated online casinos will be a good thing.