A Transdisciplinary Analysis of Online Gambling Persistence and Disruption Strategies in Indonesia

Abstract

Online gambling (judi online) has become one of Indonesia's most consequential digital-era social problems, generating fund flows that the Financial Transaction Reports and Analysis Centre recorded at Rp286.84 trillion across 422.1 million transactions in 2025 (PPATK, 2026). The persistence of mass participation despite aggressive socialisation campaigns, large-scale website blocking, and high-profile law-enforcement operations presents a clear research problem: state deterrence does not produce the disengagement that its underlying logic predicts. Existing Indonesian scholarship documents the legal and economic dimensions of the phenomenon (Lewiandy et al., 2024) and its links to predatory lending (Ramalina Ranaivo, 2024), yet it rarely integrates criminological strain theory, behavioural neuroscience, platform-capitalism critique, and transnational organised-crime analysis within a single explanatory architecture. This article addresses that gap by asking why online gambling persists in Indonesia despite systemic risk socialisation, and what an evidence-based eradication strategy would require. Adopting a critical-interpretivist paradigm and a qualitative document-analysis design, the study synthesises primary government data (PPATK, OJK, Komdigi), the Lancet Public Health Commission on gambling, and transnational-crime reporting from UNODC, the United States Institute of Peace, and the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime. The main findings show that persistence is sustained by three reinforcing mechanisms: socio-economic strain that reframes gambling as adaptive coping, platform architectures that exploit documented neurocognitive biases, and governance deficits that leave transnational financial and human-trafficking networks largely untouched. The article contributes a transdisciplinary explanatory model and a reform agenda built around biometric financial-rail closure, immigration-integrated enforcement, algorithmic co-governance, and regulated cooperative credit.