Zynga’s social casino products helped beat analysts’ forecasts in Q2 but the company continues to hemorrhage users.

Revenue in the three months ending June 30 rose 30% to $199.9m and Zynga even narrowed its net loss to a mere $26.9m, down from $62.5m in the same period last year. Advertising and other revenue hit $38m, up 7% sequentially and a hefty 70% year-on-year.

Bookings, the sale of virtual goods within games, were roughly flat year-on-year at $174.5m, but this was far better than the $157m analysts had forecast. Even better, mobile bookings rose 30% to $115m, now representing two-thirds of all bookings. However, web bookings fell 31% year-on-year to $59m.

Average daily bookings per daily average user rose 29% to 9.1¢, but average monthly unique payers dropped over 28% to 1m and player conversion fell 17% to 1.6%. (Compare that to current industry leader Caesars Interactive Entertainment, which recently boasted a 4.4% conversion rate and earned 31¢ from each user.)

South Korea’s largest casino operator Paradise Co Ltd saw its profit fall by nearly half in Q2.

Paradise, which operates five of South Korea’s 16 foreigners-only casinos and is constructing the Paradise City integrated resort near Incheon, said profit fell 47.1% to KRW12.6b (US $10.9m) in the three months ending June 30. Total revenue was down 17% to KRW 143b ($123m), driven by a 17.6% decline in gaming revenue to KRW 122.7b ($105.5m).

Table drop was down at all five Paradise properties, with the flagship Walker-Hill property in Seoul – currently the country’s largest gaming venue – falling 27% to KRW 590b. Paradise’s two properties on Jeju island – Jeju Grand and Jejue Lotte – were down 19% and 30% respectively. Paradise Casino Busan took the hardest hit, falling nearly 36% while the existing Incheon property fared best, slipping a mere 2%.

Paradise’s woes stem from several factors, including an outbreak of Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) in Korea that has finally begun showing signs of containment. The Chinese government hasn’t helped matters, warning other Asia-Pacific countries to stop luring its citizens abroad for the purpose of gambling, going as far as to single out Jeju casinos as serial offenders and arresting Koreans acting as travel agents for Korean casinos.

Authorities in Malaysia say they’ve identified an illegal text message gambling syndicate and are waiting for the right moment to crack down hard.

On Thursday, the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC) announced it had identified a syndicate offering local bookies access to online gambling services. MCMC monitoring and enforcement chief Zulkarnain Mohd Yasin said the syndicate operated via SMS text messaging channels.

Malaysia has been cracking down on illegal online gambling operators, with the MCMC announcing last month that it had blocked access to 310 gambling sites since the start of the year. Zulkarnain said the use of SMS messaging reflected the difficulties illegal bookies were having conducting business through normal channels as a result of police actions.

According to a Bernama report, Malaysian authorities uncovered the SMS scheme after seizing 11 satellite dishes from the house of a fisherman in Kuala Kurau in the country’s northern state of Perak. The Marine Police Force called it the largest seizure of illegal satellite dishes since their use was declared illegal in 1998.