South Korea Opens Probe Into Grand Korea Leisure Over Alleged Visitor Inflation

South Korea’s Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism has launched a formal investigation into Grand Korea Leisure (GKL) following allegations that the foreigner‑only casino operator inflated its 2025 visitor numbers. The probe focuses on reporting practices at Seven Luck Casino, raising concerns about how state‑linked operators measure performance — and how easily those metrics can be manipulated when verification systems lack transactional proof.

Internal data reported by Yonhap News Agency shows GKL listed 1,117,165 total visitors in 2025, including:

• • 721,817 carded members
  • 395,348 uncarded passport visitors — 35.4% of total traffic

The proportion of uncarded guests has risen sharply year‑on‑year:

• • 25.2% in 2023
  • 32.0% in 2024
  • 35.4% in 2025

This trend is highly unusual because uncarded visitors are restricted under GKL’s AML Guidelines — they cannot purchase chips, redeem chips for cash, or use currency‑exchange services. In regulated markets, such a spike typically signals data integrity issues, manual counting vulnerabilities, or performance‑metric manipulation.

Why Visitor Inflation Matters for Casino Compliance

Visitor numbers are a core KPI used by the Ministry of Finance and Economy to evaluate management performance at state‑linked operators. Inflated headcounts can artificially boost evaluation scores, mask operational weaknesses, and distort resource allocation.

In the 2025 Public Institution Management Evaluation, GKL received a “C” grade, while President Yoon Doo‑hyun was rated “unsatisfactory.”
After the internal probe began, GKL’s visitation‑target achievement rate dropped sharply:

• • 91.6% in June