A nationwide underground gambling syndicate, which allegedly took bets on lottery games and sports matches, has been brought down, the Criminal Investigation Bureau said yesterday.
Police conducted raids at 55 locations, detaining 53 suspects and seizing NT$2 billion (US$60.1 million) in illegal gambling money, it added.
Thirty-five-year-old Kao Hung-yu (高宏宇) and the other 52 suspects were allegedly behind what officials called the “largest online gambling operation in the nation’s history,” which is known as “Jiu Zhou Casino,” the bureau said.
Police said they have called in technical experts and software engineers to crack the servers used by the gang, as they suspect that the organization had been taking wagers on the results of Saturday next week’s presidential and legislative elections, which could influence the outcome.
Monday’s raids on Jiu Zhou Casino were conducted after months of surveillance and monitoring, bureau official Chiu Shao-chou (邱紹洲) said, adding that a total of 305 law enforcement officers took part in the operation, seizing 78 servers, 24 mobile phones, one network router and nine accounting ledgers.
Seized evidence and records showed that money that had been wagered by gamblers since the organization started operating last year amounted to about NT$2 billion, he said.
According to local media reports, the online gambling syndicate was being operated though a cloud computing system set up in Subic Bay in the Philippines.
Additional reporting by CNA
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