According to the China News Service, a Shanghai court has sentenced twenty people to prison for running an online sports gambling operation. The operation had created a net worth of almost one billion dollars after the operation had collected millions of dollars in bets.

The group was taking bets for oversea gambling websites through a group of local agents beginning in 2006. The first event that wagers were taken for was the World Cup in Germany. According to court reports the Court spokesman Zhang Minixian stated that this is most likely the largest online gambling case in the country.

The ringleader of the sports betting group Qian Baochun age forty one was sentenced to six years in prison and then fined five million Yuan which equals $735,000 US dollars. The other nineteen people in the case were sentenced to one year to five years in prison. Everyone plead guilty in a hearing last month.



- 2009-02-16