China loses $75bn in online gambling

BEIJING: Online gambling, though illegal, has become such a fad in China that authorities have been forced to launch repeated crackdowns to stem the outflow of nearly $75 billion in such activities almost annually.

Every year, about 600 billion yuan ($75 billion) is drawn out of the country through various online gambling activities, Peking University’s China Public Interest Lottery Research Institute has found.

The sum is 15 times the amount issued by the China Lottery and the China Sports Lottery in 2003, and equalling the total amount of national tourist revenue in 2004.

The Ministry of Public Security says since online gambling usually involves large sums of money, it can easily develop into criminal activities and be an even greater security threat.

When the World Cup was held in Germany, as many as 10 billion euros were put in the gambling companies around the world, 60 per cent of them from China and Southeast Asian countries, the China News Service reported.

During this period, police in Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Dongguan, and Zhaoqing had swooped down in some big online gambling rackets.

In Shenzhen, local police had cracked 15 football gambling cases, arrested 53 people and confiscated 260,000 yuan of gambling fund and equipment. In addition, 20 million yuan of such funds were frozen.