On February 9, 2024, the "3.24 Major Cross-border Online Casino Case" prosecuted by the People's Procuratorate of Shashi District, Jingzhou City, was sentenced in the first instance. The court sentenced the main defendant Huang and 13 other defendants to fixed-term imprisonment ranging from one year and five months to three years and ten months, and fined them between thirty thousand to two hundred thousand yuan.
Thus, a cross-border online gambling criminal group was uprooted, and all members of the criminal gang were arrested.
"Pyramid scheme" develops downline, gambling "industry chain" emerges
The amount involved is huge, and there are many people involved... From discovery, cracking, to prosecution, and sentencing, the disintegration of this cross-border online gambling group starts from a clue two years ago.
In March 2022, the Jingzhou City Public Security Bureau discovered during routine online inspections that residents in the jurisdiction were participating in online gambling on a website called "Sun City". The investigation revealed that the gambling website offered more than ten types of online card and betting games, allowing multiple people to be online at the same time, with recharge and cash-out functions, but the website's server and registration were all shown to be overseas. From then on, a cross-border online gambling group came to light.
"Baoying Group" — a criminal gang that has long been entrenched in the Pearl Tower in Manila, Philippines, specifically attracting domestic citizens to participate in online gambling, with Huang as the company head, and others as senior managers, developing lower-level agents in a "pyramid scheme", successively absorbing gamblers to bet, and profiting massively from layers of commissions. It was found that nearly 200 people were involved in the case, with over 250,000 gamblers nationwide across 25 provinces and cities, involving more than 1.6 billion yuan in gambling funds.
This criminal group has a clear hierarchy, from top to bottom as boss, senior supervisor, supervisor, team leader, and team member, operated by two lines online and offline. The online customer service and finance team are responsible for recharging gambling funds and cash withdrawals for gamblers; the offline promotion and maintenance team is responsible for attracting new gamblers and maintaining stable existing gamblers.
To evade domestic cyber police tracking and crackdown, the criminal group rented Google Cloud, Amazon Cloud, Microsoft Cloud spaces, set up various gambling and pornographic live broadcasts, and purchased many IP addresses to continuously change gambling website addresses, with traceable records showing operations since at least 2017.
To ensure smooth gambling fund recharges and withdrawals, the criminal group built a huge and diverse website payment system. The group purchased other people's bank cards for gambling funds transactions, bought other people's WeChat and Alipay accounts, conducted tripartite transactions; at the same time, they also signed agreements with domestic and foreign payment platforms to conduct fourth-party transactions, continuously diluting the flow of gambling fund transactions, and blurring the lines between criminal funds and legal transaction funds. To ensure that each fund movement was not tracked by the police, the group "cleverly" changed the payment methods to pay salaries to employees, from directly transferring to employees' salary cards, to issuing cash in pesos (Philippine currency), and then to reverse money laundering back into the country, where a designated person would deposit cash into the family members' bank accounts of the employees.
Investigative forces strike comprehensively, revealing the true face of the "gambling net"
This vast network of online gambling crimes attracted high attention from the Ministry of Public Security, which immediately assigned the 122 mechanism office to intervene, and designated the Jingzhou City Public Security Bureau to investigate. The People's Procuratorate of Jingzhou City assisted in the investigation immediately, with both agencies highly prioritizing the case, forming a special team to conduct the investigation. Senior prosecutors from the Jingzhou City Procuratorate led the team, drawing on the elite forces from the Shashi District Procuratorate, and made multiple deep dives into the case base, fully excavating this major gambling crime network.
Facing this type of complex, precisely executed, and cross-regional new gambling crime case, and with difficulties such as physical evidence collection, identification of people, determination of gambling funds, large workload, and coordination challenges, the two-level procuratorial organs and public security organs held several joint meetings, strengthening cooperation and matching evidence item by item.
As the investigation deepened, the evidence network of this online gambling crime gradually became clear—
Suspects "positioned"! Through remote forensic capture, locking down the online platform's gambling and scoring functions, using the unique features of network IP addresses and physical MAC addresses to collide, the holders of the devices involved, as well as the platform developers, debuggers, and purchasers were identified.
Financial accounts were frozen in time! Using the reported test accounts as clues, a batch of gambling platform deposit and withdrawal accounts were investigated, selecting a batch of transfer accounts with relatively long stay times, and timely freezing them to lock down the casino's financial accounts.
The criminal network was fully controlled! By reviewing the accounts of casino staff and their entry and exit records, a batch of suspects was identified, and through subsequent identification, the organizational structure of the online gambling company was gradually restored, including the peripheral renting and lending of bank cards, providing cloud storage, designing online casino web pages, and other assistance to the criminal activities.
Thoroughly clarifying the criminal facts, efficiently handling the case, and severely cracking down on crime
"Senior managers" 21 people, directly or indirectly involved in this case over 200 people. More than 70 volumes of files, each averaging 200 pages, more than 50 interrogation video discs, 2T of electronic data... Faced with the examination and prosecution of the main 21 people, and the vast volume of files and limited legal review period, and needing to actively overcome challenges such as a large number of interrogations and difficulty in summoning from other places in a short time. The prosecuting attorneys conducted strict reviews, held several case analysis meetings, concentrated on sorting out the investigation files, verified evidence, and combined the organizational, scale, and continuity characteristics of the case to ensure accurate determination of the nature of the case, principal and accessory offenders, and the amount involved.
In terms of sentencing calculation, since the crime spanned the time before and after the effectiveness of the "Criminal Law Amendment (Eleven)", the statutory penalty for operating a gambling house was adjusted from a maximum of three years of fixed-term imprisonment to a maximum of five years, and from a minimum of three years to a maximum of ten years for serious cases to a minimum of five years to a maximum of ten years. As some suspects had left the group before, to accurately apply the statutory penalty, the prosecuting attorneys carefully investigated the suspects' entry and exit records, the time they returned to the country, and the last time they received the same amount of salary, to distinguish the application of the statutory penalty for operating a gambling house before and after the effectiveness.
In terms of the involved property, the prosecutors actively communicated with the public security investigation team, conducted detailed sorting and classification, and produced dozens of pages of detailed tables of the involved property, matching and perfecting the evidence item by item. At the same time, to completely eradicate the economic foundation of the criminal group, considering the suspects' work experience, the duration of the crime, and their attitude of pleading guilty, for the seized, detained, and frozen involved property, it was suggested that the public security organs uniformly determine the property as illegal gains of the criminal group, and legally recover and confiscate it.
In terms of asset recovery, the prosecuting attorneys fully utilized the effectiveness of the leniency system for admitting guilt and accepting punishment, repeatedly clarifying to the defendants and their families the impact of admitting guilt and repaying the stolen goods on sentencing, striving for their cooperation in returning the stolen goods to seek mitigation of the sentence. All 21 defendants voluntarily signed confessions of guilt and punishment, and returned more than 2 million yuan in total, with an additional over 10 million yuan frozen and turned over.
On this basis, the procuratorial organs strictly implemented the criminal policy of combining leniency with severity. Considering that the suspects' criminal circumstances were minor, they surrendered and confessed truthfully after the case, and had circumstances such as voluntary surrender, admitting guilt and accepting punishment, returning stolen goods, and being accessories, it was decided to not prosecute 8 of the defendants relatively.
On March 10, 2023, the People's Procuratorate of Shashi District filed a public prosecution against the case, and based on the criminal facts, legal application, prosecution conditions, and the roles and functions of the defendants in the joint crime, proposed sentencing recommendations.
On February 9, 2024, the "3.24 Major Cross-border Online Casino Case" was sentenced in the first instance, ending this two-year "protracted battle".
