Photo: Snapshot from the CCTV News.

 

One year after Macao gambling kingpin Alvin Chau Cheok Wa was sentenced to 18 years in jail for fraud, illegal gambling and criminal association, more details of the criminal gang's crimes in the Chinese mainland have been recently disclosed. The case has also been shortlisted as a candidate case for the top ten typical cases promoting the Rule of Law in the New Era in 2023.

The cross-border gambling criminal group led by Chau, the founder of Macao's Suncity Group, recruited 283 Chinese shareholders to organize Chinese citizens to participate in gambling or cross-border online gambling, and from 2015 to 2019, the total amount of bets placed by the gamblers from the Chinese mainland through online gambling exceeded 300 billion yuan (roughly $42 billion), CCTV News reported.

In August 2022, the Intermediate People's Court of Wenzhou in East China's Zhejiang Province disclosed three cases involving the core members of the cross-border gambling criminal group led by Chau after a three-day trial. The trial provided substantial evidence for the arrest and trial of Alvin Chau Cheok Wa in Macao and directly promoted the adding of the crime of organizing or participating in gambling activities outside the Chinese mainland into the Criminal Law Amendment.

According to the trial, it was found that since 2007, Chau has been contracting gambling halls in casinos in Macao, and since 2015, he has opened multiple online gambling platforms in the Philippines and other places for gambling activities. To make huge profits, Chau used commissions and dividends to recruit 283 agents from the mainland, whose duty is to organize and recruit Chinese citizens to go to Sun City gambling halls for gambling or engage in cross-border online gambling activities.

As the scale of gambling continues to expand, the criminal group has set up branch companies in the mainland to provide services such as asset exchange for gambling credit and chips to agents and gamblers, as well as to collect gambling debts. In order to evade supervision and crackdown, they also use illegal channels such as underground banks to receive and settle gambling funds.

The gambling criminal group also fabricated trading agreements and repeatedly conducted cross-border fund settlements, with the illegal profits reaching over 17 million yuan, seriously disrupting the order of China's financial market.

In November 2021, Macao police detained Chau and other suspects for being involved in illegally running gambling businesses or money laundering, and referred the case to procurators.

According to the ruling of the Court of First Instance of the Macao Special Administrative Region (SAR) in January 2023, Chau was sentenced to 18 years in prison. Several other co-defendants in the case were also sentenced to years in prison. Chau was also sentenced to pay the Macao SAR government 6.52 billion Hong Kong dollars (roughly $ 833.3 million) in civil compensation.

The case has comprehensively verified the specific harmful behaviors of the cross-border gambling criminal group such as organization and agency, gambling fund settlement, online gambling, asset management, technology, and vehicle services. And all these behaviors have been cracked down throughout the entire chain, which has a landmark significance for China's lawful crackdown on cross-border gambling crimes, according to officials of the Intermediate People's Court of Wenzhou, as quoted by CCTV News.