By Kim Rahn
Officers from the National Police Agency’s Cyber Terror Response Center said Thursday they had busted a ring operating an illegal online gambling website that raked in some 1 trillion won ($897 million) from Koreans over three years.
The center said it had arrested one suspect, a 30-year-old surnamed Lee, on charges of operating an illegal gambling site overseas.
He allegedly operated an online casino with dozens of accomplices since 2009 while also offering some arcade games, including Sea Story.
Police took Lee into custody while raiding an office in Cambodia in cooperation with police from the Southeast Asian country last month. They are still looking for the other suspects.
Based in Cambodia, members of the group were in charge of different areas such as computer system management, program development, general affairs and a call center operation.
“Most of them were IT experts who graduated from prestigious colleges here, and some of them had been engaged in the online game industry before joining the team,” a police officer from the Cyber Terror Response Center said.
The suspects used a server in another country and collected money from gamers through thousands of borrowed-name bank accounts.
Each gambler paid at least 30,000 won via the website. Police suspect the money earned reached 1 trillion won, with about 100 people losing more than 1 billion won each.
“We haven’t arrested the key operator of the site and don’t know the exact number of suspects yet. We need to investigate further,” the officer said.
On Tuesday, operators of another gambling site were caught in Busan.
Police in the southern port city said they arrested a 46-year-old man, surnamed Kwak, on suspicions of operating an illegal sports betting site and making 1.7 billion won in illegal gains.
They booked another 16 people without detention for colluding with Kwak, including site developers and middlemen who sold borrowed-name bank accounts.
Kwak invited the accomplices, whom he met while playing computer games about 10 years ago, and operated the site with them for the last 30 months.
They used a server in Japan and set up offices in Korea and the Philippines. They developed a mobile gambling program, so that users could bet with their smartphones.
Some 3,150 people played games on the site, betting 25 billion won. Police booked 57 of them who habitually gambled large amounts of money.