Online Casinos in Malaysia

Two Layers of Law, and They Are Not the Same

Malaysian gambling law works on two levels, and flattening them into one sentence gets the country wrong. The first level is federal civil law, which applies to everybody in Malaysia. The second is syariah criminal law, administered by the states and the Federal Territories, which creates its own gambling offence.

The Federal Position on Online Gambling

The Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission states that online gambling activity falls under the Common Gaming Houses Act 1953 (Act 289), and that it is committed to supporting the Royal Malaysia Police in suppressing it. The division of labour, in the Commission's own words, is that the police carry out enforcement while the Commission provides technical assistance, including supplying information and blocking websites with a gambling character at the police's request. Its English-language account of the same work puts it more plainly still: the blocking is conducted on formal requests from the police for violations of the Common Gaming Houses Act 1953.

The scale of that blocking is published. The Commission blocked 6,381 online gambling websites between 2020 and the end of 2022, and 212,399 telephone lines, mobile and fixed, that sent suspicious spam messages promoting online gambling, unlicensed loans and the like were disconnected over the same period.

The Syariah Layer

Gambling is separately an offence under syariah criminal law. The Mufti of the Federal Territories sets out section 18 of the Syariah Criminal Offences (Federal Territories) Act 1997, Act 559: a person who gambles, or who is found in a gambling house, commits an offence and on conviction is liable to a fine of up to three thousand ringgit or imprisonment of up to two years or both. The same section defines a gambling house widely enough to cover any premises used for a game whose outcome depends on luck, or on a mixture of skill and luck, for money or money's worth, whether or not any other law permits it.

Which people that layer reaches is a matter of jurisdiction rather than of the gambling provision itself. The Mufti's office records that the Federal Constitution places power over Islamic religious affairs with the states, in the Ninth Schedule, List II, and that a gazetted fatwa binds only Muslims in the state or territory concerned and does not apply to non-Muslims. Acts contrary to a gazetted fatwa may be treated as an offence and prosecuted in the Syariah Court. The federal civil offences, by contrast, draw no such distinction. The text of Act 559 itself is published as a PDF and is not quoted here, so nothing is stated about whom section 18 reaches.

What Is Available Instead

The prohibition has two layers: the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission states that online gambling activity falls under the Common Gaming Houses Act 1953, and section 18 of the Syariah Criminal Offences (Federal Territories) Act 1997 makes gambling, or being found in a gambling house, an offence for those it covers. No licensed casino, lottery or betting route is named here.