Multi-billion dollars World Cup crypto gambling racket gets busted

Police in southern Guangdong province said that they had apprehended six major suspects of the syndicate, frozen about five million yuan in their bank accounts, and seized over 10 million yuan worth of cryptocurrencies they own, reported South China Morning Post.

As per the report, 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. Some 330,000 registered users from a number of countries attended the gambling platform, 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.