Online Poker Case in China
As reported by Xinhua, the official state news agency A Hong Kong man, found guilty of running a number of gambling Websites, was sentenced to eight years and fined 20 million yuan (2.9 million U.S. dollars) in southwest China’s Yunnan Province. The case, believed to be the country’s biggest online gambling case, involved about 8.68 billion yuan in wagered money and more than 278 million yuan in illegal profits, a source of the Yunnan High People’s Court said on Wednesday.
“Tam Chi-wai, a Hong Kong resident, set up a gambling house in Myanmar in 1999 and then started to develop an online betting network. More than 3,000 people used to work for the Tam’s gambling network, the news agency reported.
Why must online poker and gambling in general continue to be made illegal? Cases like this are happening all over the world, and as I have said many times, if governments would legalize online and offline poker and gambling, they could tax it and add a new stream of revenue. Who is against that?
While we all love to play online poker, we must never take our right to do so for granted, because we’re always one despotic politician or judge away from having it taken away. Poker players, we must remain ever vigilant!
