China Takes Down Casino Scheme
Although the world is slowly opening to online gambling and many countries, especially in Europe, as starting to promote internet gambling legislation and regulation, China is yet to join the game. The People’s Republic of China does not allow online casino services to operate within the country. The Chinese government is not a big supporter of the internet and following the censorship scandal of Google’s search engine and other online services, it is not surprising that the Chinese authorities are working at stopping online casino gambling in China. With logging into gambling websites is illegal in China, most of the citizens stay about from online casinos. However, there are other ways at offering online gambling to the Chinese public.
An online gambling ring that has operated in China for the last two year has been shut down recently by the Chinese authorities. The firm generated an estimated sum of $520 million during its operating years, showing that although the authorities do not approve – clients are not hard to find in China. As part of the shutdown, 37 people have been arrested for their involvement in running the online casino. The Chinese authorities have also arrested five shareholders of the company, showing that everyone linked to online gambling is at risk. Foreign investors looking for a good investment should not consider internet gambling as a wise business choice as for now.
It seems that the firm had thousands of customers and members throughout China. The operation was a pyramid-based organization where junior members could make their bets through agents. There were three levels of memberships and each one was entitled to different betting options and authorities. The actual betting took place through offshore gambling websites, where agents took the bets for their clients. China is known for its hard internet censorship, and the online casino scheme was discovered as a result of such monitoring. By logging into 13 online websites, one of the agents was red-flagged and the authorities learned about the illegal activity.
