22 Techies Busted for Running Illegal Online Sports Betting in Taiwan

Taiwanese police have arrested 22 computer programmers, web engineers and internet developers for running multiple illegal online sportsbooks in Taiwan.

According to CIB (Criminal Investigation Bureau), the ‘computer nerd mafia’ was making tens of millions of dollars in yearly profits from bets on local and international sporting events.
To protect themselves from the police, the group relied on advanced cloaking technology to mask the location of the servers.

However, since the online sportsbook servers were made in Taiwan it took the National Police Agency (NPA) only two years to crack the case. NPA raided the New Taipei City server operations room where they found 100 computers and servers.

The Taiwan gambling laws place a severe restriction on all forms of gambling that the government doesn’t control.

In a curious turn of events, the mastermind of the illegal gambling operation were the very same programmers who set up the gambling operation for corporate executives that was shut down in 2009 by the Ministry of Justice’s Investigation Bureau (MJIB).

After watching how much money bet on sports in Taiwan company generated for the executives, the programmers decided to open twenty online sports books for themselves.

The group had set up operations in the Greater Taipei area and Taichung City in central Taiwan as well as overseas locations in Hong Kong and the Philippines in an attempt to evade the law enforcement authorities.

Police claim that the computer programmers were not above strong arming punters who lost and refused to pay. Police allege that dozens of gamblers who lost committed suicide, thousands of families were broken up and the presence of online gambling in Taiwan almost unwound the very moral fabric of society.

Such is always the case with arrests involving gambling, where police have to spend more time defending their actions since practically every single Taiwanese gambles illegally since has been an integral of the culture of Taiwan for centuries.

The 22 suspects were arrested after raids at seven different locations in Taiwan were carried out by officers from the CIB and other local police departments on the island in simultaneous operations led by prosecutors.