Reports of illegal gambling operations being busted in parts of Asia are pretty common. But rarely do they come this big.

Chinese news services are reporting details of a very large online gambling crackdown, over a year in the planning and focused on shutting down an illegal operation said to have been responsible for more than $75 billion in bets being placed by mainland Chinese customers on various casino websites.

Operation 109 (no lucky number 8 in there!) began last year, and culminated in September with the arrest of the syndicate’s mastermind named only as Xu (surname) from Chaoshan in eastern Guangdong. Since July there have been 84 arrests of individuals involved across a number of locations around China including Shenzhen, Jieyang, Shantou, Dongguan and Guangzhou.

Over a million Chinese gamblers were registered customers of the gambling service which had its major servers located in Taiwan and multilingual customer service staff based in Thailand, Hong Kong and the Philippines.

One of a number of arrests. Image source: China Police Daily

A Shenzhen-based web development company was responsible for building and maintaining the casino sites.

Details of the exact nature of the operation are only slowly coming to light, but it seems there was a multilevel marketing element to the operation, with members encouraged to recruit new customers, and new customer recruiting agents.

Back to Macau for a million or so Chinese baccarat players!