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Chinese Gambling Sports Betting Syndicate Busted

After falling into gambling debts, a clever punter decided to exploit the time delay between live action in sports and the showing of it on TV. The delay was large enough for his team to place wagers after they had seen the final result, but before this data had reached the sportsbook. Ever the entrepreneur, he recruited a number of players from around China to help him, sending them to Europe in order to place wagers on various sporting events. They managed to amass around $4 million.

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Chinese Gambling Ring Busted

We all know how much Chinese gamblers have an obsession with betting. This is due to a history of extreme poverty coupled with many beliefs in luck and the supernatural. As a result, you’ll find more betting opportunities for Chinese gambling than anywhere else in the world. They are perfectly willing to accept bets on competitions and outcomes that would be considered totally off-limits in the West. In some respects, this leads to a darker side to gambling.

It’s probably no coincidence that many of the large gambling scams that target sports bookies around the world, happen to originate from China. Chinese gambling syndicates have long tentacles which can be found influencing the outcome of everything from Premier League football matches to the World Series in cricket. Therefore it’s no surprise to find that the Chinese government has recently announced they’ve taken down an illegal gambling syndicate. These criminals managed to amass around $4.6 million through exploiting various loopholes that appear in online betting accounts.

Identifying An Opportunity

The illegal Chinese gambling syndicate operated from the city of Wenzhou and was active for around 7 months. According to the Wenzhou Evening News newspaper, the syndicate had access to hundreds of money-losing sports betting accounts. This allowed them to exploit the incentives that are gifts to unsuccessful, but big-spending gamblers. These high rollers tend to receive constant offers from online casinos including bigger bet sizes, unlimited withdrawals and cashback on losses.

According to the Wenzhou police, the leader of the gang was known as “Shi.” He was the owner of an internet cafe situated in the city. After losing large amounts of money through betting on various sports, Shi discovered that in spite of using significant sums of money, the sportsbooks would still offer incentives in order that he would consider betting more. So Shi realised that by being able to access the Chinese gambling accounts of losers, there may be a possible edge. The whole enterprise revolved around exploiting the gap between the short latency of data and the broadcast feeds.

How The Chinese Gambling Scam Worked

Shi asked Chinese gambling associates and other bettors to start posting on social media looking for certain types of losing betting accounts. He promised those with such accounts between 1,000 yuan ($157) and 5,000 yuan ($784) each day. In the beginning, around 200 people from all around China got in touch. We should point out that in Chinese gambling, money betting with sportsbooks requires facial recognition for the opening of an account. Obviously, you don’t need this to play at 22Bet Sportbook. They are hugely popular in China and offer all new players a great welcome bonus, as well as access to all sporting events from around the globe. But to get around this, Shi offered to have account holders live in his father’s house. This was so that they could make this an easier option.

Word quickly spread around and within a short time. Shi was able to partner up with a Hainan province-based gambler called Wang. This gambler decided to invest in this scam. As a result, he set about building a team of dozens of gamblers as well as sports betting analysts. He would send team members to sporting events in Europe and across Southeast Asia. He was actually taking advantage of instant betting functions. As previously mentioned, these were exploiting the short-latency between data and broadcast of data.

The scam came down to the fact that these gamblers were able to place their bets on sporting events at a faster rate than the people who are watching the game through a live feed. For instance, if there was a goal during a game of football, then a team of gamblers would be able to place a bet on the final score of the game before the result was broadcast.

The Outcome Of The Chinese Gambling Investigation

Unfortunately, all good things come to an end. During the police investigation, they saw that Shi’s team looked after the account holders and the betting accounts. Wang’s team was supervising the actual travel and betting. As part of the operation, they purchased almost 3,000 bank cards. So far, the Wenzhou police department managed to pick up 69 suspects. They also were able to seize 136 mobile phones, along with 36 computers. They also froze about $3 million. We should point out that when it comes to Chinese gambling, the only form of betting that’s legal, is State-run lotteries. Nevertheless, many Chinses gamblers illegally use VPNs to access foreign online sportsbooks like 22Bet Sportsbook. And these sites are happy to have them, accepting deposits and paying out in the Chinese currency of the Renminbi.