Chinese Police Bust Crypto Betting Ring Allegedly Worth $1.5 Billion

Chinese authorities have busted what they said was one of the world’s largest online betting operations involving cryptocurrency, with over $1.5 billion in illicit bets allegedly on the line.

According to the South China Morning Post, police in southern Guangdong province said late this week that they had nabbed “six major suspects of the syndicate,” seizing about five million yuan ($748,000) and an additional 10 million yuan ($1,495,000) in crypto. Authorities claimed that the syndicate operated on the dark web, the portion of the internet that can only be accessed via special software or configuration settings, and involved hundreds of thousands of users as well as a small army of digital pit bosses:

The gambling platform ran on the so-called dark web, which isn’t indexed by traditional search engines, and only accepted cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin, ethereum, and litecoin, according to Guangdong police. During the eight months of the gambling platform’s operation, the site attracted 330,000 registered users from numerous countries, and built an army of over 8,000 agents who earned commissions for recruiting new members through a pyramid scheme, the police said.

The gambling syndicate “used the loophole that virtual currency is not effectively regulated in our country” to make huge profits, said the police statement.