Twenty Convicted in China

In 2006 an outlaw online gambling group began around the time that Germany hosted the World Cup. There were twenty people involved in that scandal and they are now in the process of being sentenced to prison. Their individual sentences range from as short as one year to as many as six years in a prison in Shanghai. The Shanghai courts made the decision recently regarding the illegal gambling. Their decision surely sent the signal out to the potential online casino entrepreneurs from engaging in illegal gambling activities in China. The creator of the online casinos and gambling websites, Qian Baochum put the forty one year old man away for six years in a Shanghai prison and ordered him to pay fines and penalties of 735,000 dollars in United States’ currency.

The nineteen other people that were convicted in the illegal online casino and gambling websites case were given less severe punishments and are serving a range of sentences from one year to five years in prison. This has definitely been one of the biggest gambling cases in the history of China. The reason why the punishment for these alleged online casinos was so severe is because the lengths that they went through to conceal the conspiracy like internet gambling sites. The leaders of the group went as far as to set up off shore accounts where they developed their illegal business and racked up a clientele. Once their operation became too big for the original count they brought on more people to run the business which earned over 1.6 million yean per year.

The illegal online casino run by the convicted felons was quickly shut down by the Chinese government upon the start of their investigation. China the largest and most populated country in the world; with a whopping 180 million people, they out do the United States who only has 163million people that use the internet. While china would be an ideal place for the online casino industry, the likely hood of the Chinese government allowing that to happen is slim to none.