Indonesia orders banks to hunt for “hidden” gambling-linked accounts using national ID numbers

Indonesia’s financial regulator, OJK, has told banks to use national identification numbers (NIK) to find other accounts belonging to people suspected of links to illegal online gambling. For high-risk payments teams, the important part is simple: the enforcement target is no longer just the flagged account, but the person behind it.

1. OJK’s new instruction expands the old workflow. Previously, the Ministry of Communication and Digital Affairs would send banks a list of accounts and the bank would block them. Now banks must look wider: use NIK to find all accounts held by the same person, including accounts authorities did not already know about, run EDD (enhanced due diligence), and block or close accounts where needed.
2. The regulator’s immediate reference set is 38,796 accounts that have been put under EDD based on data from the Ministry of Communication and Digital Affairs. Banks are also expected to monitor bought and sold gambling accounts, with particular attention to accounts showing a high number of small transfers, and to strengthen transaction monitoring more broadly.
3. PPATK’s first-half-2026 figures show the scale of the issue: online gambling turnover reached Rp 86.82 trillion (~$5.17 billion) across 467.32 million transactions. Deposits totaled Rp 22.05 trillion (~$1.31 billion) across 226.76 million transactions through bank accounts, e-wallets, and QRIS.
4. The enforcement side is already active. PPATK said operations on 5,762 accounts were suspended, courts ordered the confiscation of about Rp 588.62 billion (~$35 million), banks rejected 2.8 million prospective customers, and they ended relationships with 51,200 existing ones.
5. For payment providers, the operational message is blunt: if one account is tagged, the rest of the holder’s accounts can come under review too. That is especially awkward for P2P flows that rely on pools of individual drop accounts. PPATK’s explicit attention to e-wallets and QRIS also means channel switching is no longer a clean escape hatch.

One detail worth keeping in mind: PPATK is not just looking at bank accounts. It is separately counting e-wallet and QRIS activity, which is exactly why “we moved it to another rail” stops being a reassuring sentence in this market.