Gambling in China
[3] In practice however, Chinese citizens participate in state-run lotteries, regularly travel to legal gambling centers overseas or in the special administrative regions of Hong Kong and Macau, and access gaming through offshore based proxy betting and online gambling companies.
In 2010, The Daily Telegraph (UK) reported that an estimated one trillion yuan are wagered in illegal gambling every year in China.
Integrated gaming resorts in Singapore, Australia, Korea, Vietnam and the Philippines welcome growing numbers of Chinese tourists.
In proxy betting, clients communicate with staffers wearing headsets at baccarat tables in offshore casinos.
Proxy betting was outlawed in Macau in 2016 and has never been permitted in Australia or Singapore casinos, but now accounts for 40 percent of the $1 billion VIP gaming market in the Philippines, according to brokerage CICC.
According to 2019 estimates published in Economic Information Daily, an affiliate of state-owned news agency Xinhua, the annual amount bet through online gambling in the Mainland is more than one trillion yuan (US$145 billion), equivalent to nearly twice the annual income of China’s officially sanctioned lotteries.
[14] In October 2014, The Guardian newspaper reported that one major online site, Bet365 had been taking bets from Chinese citizens by using obscure domain names in order to avoid government web censorship.
[4]: 102 Under POGO, the state-owned Philippine Amusement and Gaming Corporation issued licenses to be used for service providers to offer online gambling.
[4]: 102 Over a three-year period beginning in 2016, at least 100,000 Chinese nationals were estimated to have moved to Manila to work for online gambling operators as marketing agents, tech support specialists and IT engineers to serve Mandarin-speaking clientele.
[16] To side step restrictions on direct marketing of online gambling in Mainland Chinese print or social media, many online gaming sites seeking to attract Chinese customers have become shirt sponsors for English Premier League football teams.
[4]: 106 In 2019, they opened the National Police's Anti-Technology Crime Division joint operations center in Phnom Penh.
