Biggest online betting ring bust in China's history
Lin Yu-ping and Staff Reporter
2015-04-26
Police bust the illegal online betting operation based in Thailand, April 23. (Photo/Lin Yu-ping)
Chinese authorities have busted an illegal online betting operation, the largest to be caught in the country's history, with the help of Taiwan and Thailand, Taiwan's Criminal Investigation Bureau (CIB) said Thursday.
A total of 1,071 suspects involved in the criminal operation that ran the 25U betting websites were arrested in a series of raids since late December, including 1,063 in China, seven in Thailand and one in Taiwan, the CIB said.
The suspect arrested in Taiwan on April 21 was identified as Huang Yu-jui, who admitted to police that he provided his bank accounts for money laundering, according to the CIB.
The seven suspects nabbed in Thailand's Nakhon Pathom region were Chinese nationals, who were operating the betting websites remotely from the Southeast Asian country, the CIB added.
Police in China also seized over 20 million yuan (US$3.2 million) linked to the illegal operation.
Authorities in southern China's Guangdong province first received information about the illegal operation in February 2014, when several people reported to police losing large sums of money on bets placed through 25U websites.
According to the CIB, the criminals ran a total of 199 websites, which allowed people to bet on results of lotteries sold in China and Hong Kong.
The main suspects, only identified by their surnames of Chen and Zhang, are said to have run a pyramid scheme by setting up betting sites and renting them out to their recruits. People that rented the sites for 70,000-100,000 yuan (US$11,400-$16,300) per month then made money from betting operations or by subletting the website, the CIB explained.
The 25U websites have up to 550,000 members, who placed bets of over NT$2 trillion (US$64.7 billion) every month. No Taiwanese national was found to have placed bets with the sites, the CIB said.
Chinese investigators contacted Taiwan for assistance under a joint crime-fighting agreement across the Taiwan Strait after they found Taiwanese connections regarding servers used by the website and the fund flow of the illegal operation, the CIB said.
