GUANGDONG police have apprehended 1,071 people involved in an online gambling network, the provincial police department said yesterday.

    About 330 million yuan (US$52.8 million) has been frozen by the police, said Lu Feng, an official with the department.

    The gang illegally opened online casinos and attracted bets valued at 400 billion yuan each month, equivalent to one-fourth of Guangzhou’s GDP last year, according to Lu.

    It was the largest online gambling case since 1949 when the People’s Republic of China was founded, in terms of the amounts of bets and suspects, he said.

    The suspects were rounded up from June to December last year, including 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. (Xinhua)