South Korea’s Kangwon Land is under scrutiny over how it manages casino reward cards after data showed that one member was issued 146 replacement cards in 2024, roughly one every two and a half days.
The figures were released on October 7th by Cha Gyu-geun, a lawmaker from the Rebuilding Korea Party who sits on the National Assembly’s trade and industry committee, during the parliament’s annual audit of state agencies. The data were reported by Yonhap News Agency and Pinpoint News.
Kangwon Land runs the only South Korean casino open to locals. Players earn High1 points based on their casino play, and the points can be spent at resort facilities and at participating merchants in the surrounding region.
According to the data, neither the card terms nor the company’s internal guidelines limit how often a card can be replaced, and there is no requirement to check repeated requests. The most frequent replacer received 92 cards in 2022, 145 in 2023, 146 in 2024 and 125 in 2025.
Records kept apart
Kangwon Land told Cha’s office that replacement records and records of points misuse were held in separate systems to protect personal information and could not be matched against each other.
Because the cards are physical, critics worry they could be handed to other people, allowing points to be resold for cash that is then used for more gambling. The reports did not link any confirmed misuse case to the members concerned.
“If one person received a new points card 146 times in a year, Kangwon Land should first look into why,” Cha said, according to an English translation published by iGaming Times. He called for limits on replacements or a way to track how cards circulate, and for the operator to establish whether frequent losses of cards point to excessive gambling that requires customer protection.
The points program has drawn criticism before. Data obtained in October 2024 by lawmaker Heo Seong-mu showed Kangwon Land had detected 14 misuse cases in the first eight months of that year, after which it terminated the contracts of the merchants involved.
The latest questions come as the operator faces pressure on other parts of the business, including a slot business that has lost money for six consecutive years.
