A policeman shows items confiscated from busting an online gambling ring in Guangzhou, South China's Guangdong province, April 1, 2015. Guangdong police detained 1,071 suspects and froze bets valued at 330 million yuan (US$52.8 million), the largest such series of arrests since the founding of People's Republic of China in 1949. (Photo: China News Service/Chen Jimin)
Chinese police have apprehended 1,071 people involved in an online gambling network, the public security department of south China's Guangdong Province said on Wednesday.
About 330 million yuan (about 52.8 million U.S. dollars) were frozen by the police, said Lu Feng, an official with the department.
The suspects were rounded up from June to December last year and include a dozen who developed and operated gambling platforms and more than 1,000 clients who rented the platforms to run their own gambling operations, according to Lu.
Over 500 of those captured are still in detention, Lu said.
The group, led by two men from Guangdong's Shantou City, built around 200 gambling websites, mostly on Thai servers. Each website was rented out for 70,000 to 100,000 yuan per month.
Gambling has been illegal on the Chinese mainland since 1949.
