China Cracking Down on Illegal Crypto Gambling Scene

No Coining it In for This Lot!

When illegal betting sites spring up, it isn’t long before they’re discovered and then they’re instantly shut down. Thankfully, the UK has a heavily regulated market with a lot of resources, which makes it safe for us to play bingo and games online. And it just goes to show you how well our authorities do their job because in all the years I have been playing, I have never come across a rogue website, and I hope I never do!

Police in Yancheg city, Jiangsu province of China are pretty hot at their job too, and in the first nine months of 2020, the Chinese government were behind the arrests of 60,000 gambling suspects! But that’s not all! According to official data from China’s Ministry of Culture and Tourism, 1,400 illegal gambling sites were shut down too, the most recent being from an investigation which started out back in October 2020.

Digital Currency Casino Craze

By November of last year, the police had gone through some 27million transactions after uncovering an illegal gambling operation on the EOS blockchain network. It’s all to do with cryptocurrency, a digital payment service which is said to be anonymous, making it near on impossible to trace the users. According to Google, the EOS system is “the smart contract platform claims to eliminate transaction fees and also conduct millions of transactions per second.” I feel sorry for the people who had to go through all those multiple millions of transactions!

When the numbers were crunches, a total of 26 smart contract addresses were discovered in the investigation, all of which were associated with the mobile gambling platform, which operators would the use as addresses for wagering on casino games and prize distribution. After some early morning raids in December, 15 people were arrested for being part of an illegal outfit. In the bust, EOS and BTC digital currencies were confiscated, an amount worth almost $3.8m! Since launching as a new site in July 2018, it had raked in more than $10m for the operator.

This isn’t the first digital currency bust in China and the authorities suspect it won’t be the last. The biggest scam in history was uncovered last November and was known as PlusToken. In this raid, the police managed to seize 194,775 Bitcoin (BTC), 833,083 Ether, 27.6 million EOS and other currencies and when the folks at HQ added all that up, it came to an eye-watering haul of $4.2billion!

Online gambling in China has been illegal for years now but that doesn’t seem to stop the illegal websites popping up here and there. If digital currencies weren’t so widely used or so popular, gambling online in China wouldn’t exist. Data suggests billions of dollars of digital currencies are changing hands every month in the country and cracking down on that is going to be a lot harder than shutting down websites.

Remember folks, stay safe online by researching the websites you are thinking of playing at. Read reviews – these are the most important resources available to you and when it comes to making the right choice.

Source: “Chinese Police Arrest 15 Over EOS Gambling App, Seize $3.8m in Digital Currencies.” . Coin Geek. April 17, 2021.