Government for the world’s largest Communist state is hoping to eradicate illegal online gambling by ‘severely punishing’ operators and platform providers.
Thursday 11th February 2010
China is planning a crackdown on the online gambling industry including website operators with severe punishments for those who run underground banks and third-party payment platforms.
According to a report from the Reuters news service, the nation’s Ministry Of Public Security revealed that its campaign would run until August and will ‘concentrate on investigating major and important cases of online gambling, knock out domestic and foreign groups that organise online gambling and severely punish the criminal elements’.
The news service reported that the concentrated effort was agreed to by eight government bodies including the Supreme Court, Propaganda Bureau, the Central Bank and the Ministry Of Industry And Information Technology.
All gambling was banned in mainland China after the Communist takeover in 1949 with the exception of two state lotteries. One of these is run by the Ministry Of Sport in order to fund the building of facilities. Underground casinos, overseas conglomerates and illegal syndicates have since sprung up all over the nation to fill the gap with this latest campaign set to replicate a similar drive designed to eradicate pornography. Many sites have been caught in the long-running anti-pornography operation including those featuring politically sensitive and user-generated content, with many critics viewing it as a bid by the Chinese government to reassert control over new media.
