China police hit online gamblers

China is cracking down on gambling of all kinds

Chinese police have arrested nearly 600 people in 22 provinces as part of their crackdown on gambling, the official China Daily newspaper reported.

Police raided two online gambling rings, one of them Taiwan-based, which they suspect may have handled bets worth as much as $60m (£32.1m).

Gambling is illegal in China, but is increasingly popular online and in casinos just across China's borders.

Border police have stepped up searches of travellers for illicit cash.

China launched its anti-gambling drive last week, after it emerged that a senior official had lost at least $300,000 in public money on trips to a North Korean casino. Cai Hao-wen has since gone on the run.

Mafia gangs

The arrests have expanded the scope of the crackdown to include online betting.

Police arrested 597 people involved with the Taiwan-based group, of whom 202 were gamblers and 395 were organisers, according to Tong Jianming, an official at the Ministry of Public Security quoted by China Daily.

Police seized 23m yuan ($2.8m; £1.5m) but the ministry believes the group and its mainland criminal gangs took bets totalling five times that sum in Beijing alone since May.

Soccer scores

Police in Beijing have also arrested a man they believe ran the local branch of a separate, international gambling syndicate, which took bets on football matches in the UK Premier League football and Italy's Serie A.

Many Chinese go to nearby Macau to try their luck

Gambling online generally requires an international credit card for cross-border transactions, and is therefore only open to well-off Chinese.

Computer data suggests that the Beijing group's gamblers bet the equivalent of $133m in the last six months.

"Collecting evidence on online gambling is a hard nut to crack. It's a brand new gambling means and imposed great challenges in our work," the newspaper quoted Yu Hongyuan, the vice-director of Beijing Public Security Bureau, as saying.

Police in south west China's Yunnan province are clamping down on conventional casinos by targeting the bank accounts of Chinese casino bosses running gambling operations over the border in Vietnam, Laos and Thailand.

Macau is the only region in mainland China to permit gambling, which forms a large part of its economy.

The popularity of gaming in Macau's casinos was illustrated on Friday when shares in Hong Kong-listed property developer K Wah Construction shot up 20% on speculation that the Macau authorities have agreed to sell it a majority stake in Galaxy Casino.