China's police bust online gambling mega-den
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E-mail Xinhua, April 1, 2015
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| Equipment seized by Guangdong police are seen in this undated photo. More than 40 servers and computers, 55 bank cards and 28 deposit books were seized during the special operation. [Photo/Chinanews.com] |
Police have frozen bank accounts holding about 330 million yuan (about 52.8 million U.S. dollars), said Lu Feng, an official with the department.
The suspects were rounded up from June to December last year and include 15 suspected of developing and operating gambling platforms and more than 1,000 clients suspected of renting the platforms to run their own gambling operations.
A total of 570 of those captured are in detention, Lu said.
The group, led by two men from Guangdong's Shantou City, built around 200 gambling websites, mostly on Thai servers. Each website was rented out for 70,000 to 100,000 yuan per month.
The membership-based gambling websites attracted hundreds of thousands of bettors who betted on results of the country's lottery, according to Yu Canxian, head of the department's cyber police contingent.
The clients who rented the platforms developed a six-tier pyramid system to attract gamblers. Gambling companies set up by themselves were on the top of the system, followed by their branches, agencies, while individual gamblers were on the bottom.
Among the websites, 125 allowed betting on the results of a type of lottery named "Shi Shi Cai". They had 400,000 members and their bets totaled 400 billion yuan per month. In December alone, the members lost nine billion yuan.
"Most of the gambling money was not frozen, because the transactions were done through cash and illegal private banks," Yu said.
The police were helped by counterparts in Thailand and Taiwan, Lu Feng said. "We caught seven people responsible for the websites' maintenance in Thailand."
Gambling has been illegal on the Chinese mainland since 1949. This is the largest lottery-related online gambling case the country has cracked, according to the Ministry of Public Security.
In recent years, prosperous Guangdong has suffered serious consequences from rampant online gambling, such as suicides of indebted gamblers and violent debt collection, according to the provincial public security department.
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