China’s “Hardcore Reporter” Online Casino Investigation

*The following is translated from a blog by a writer known as “Hardcore Reporter”

For the past six months, I have been active in the south of the country. I have lived in Sihanoukville, Cambodia for a short time. This region has now become the Chinese online gambling industry base, along with the whole of Southeast Asia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Malaysia and other countries, the Chinese “net gambling” is in full swing.

At present, hundreds of thousands of Chinese people work 12 hours a day outside the country, serving gamblers in the domestic (Chinese) market.

This is an unavoidable social phenomenon. It is like a giant beast in a lake. It rarely rises to the surface, but it stirs the undercurrent in the deep scent of human nature. 

As a self-proclaimed hardcore reporter, I want to figure out and have an obligation to figure out the inside story of the Chinese online gambling industry.

Hundreds of thousands of Chinese “planting vegetables” in Southeast Asia

Online gambling is called “spinach” (the homonym of gambling) in the slang of practitioners, while practitioners call themselves “vegetable farmers”. 

The overseas city where I have seen the most vegetable farmers is Sihanoukville. As the largest port city in Cambodia, there are about 120,000 Chinese vegetable farmers, which is equivalent to the number of local Cambodians. The gaming companies are located in urban areas.

– I am marking the Westport Gaming Base on the Maps.me map –

The gaming company’s base is similar to an office building. There are no signboards, and there are rows of computers in the room. In each room, hundreds of extensions sit in front of the computer, contact customers via WeChat, and guide customers to bet. A large-scale base can accommodate 5,000 people, and the entire Westport has dozens of online gaming bases.

In the slum near the Manila Airport in the Philippine capital, in an office building called the Pearl Tower, the Chinese are all night to make gambling.Because of its extremely harsh working environment and the enslavement of its employees, the Pearl Tower is also known as the “Manila Oriental Prison”.

– China Gaming Building next to the slums. Pictures from the Internet –

In the Golden Triangle of Laos, the Chinese office of the gaming company is connected. Every morning, thousands of practitioners are on the streets.

I stayed there for more than half a month. At that time, according to the number of vegetable farmer buildings, the number of betting practitioners was around 20,000.

– Gaming company office building in the Golden Triangle Special Zone –

There are also a large number of Chinese bookmakers in Myanmar and Poipet in Cambodia. Southeast Asia has become an extraterritorial place for China’s gaming industry. Hundreds of thousands of Chinese vegetable farmers, like locusts, are generally “invasive”, overwhelming and sweeping in.

▶ MLM pyramid internet gambling company

If you think that the spinach is very low and the bookmakers are growing wildly, you can be wrong. In fact, on the technical level, the professionalism of bookmakers is comparable to that of domestic internet companies. There are management system, employee incentives, and God-like pyramid schemes.

Gaming practitioners are broadly divided into four major types of customer service, personnel, promotion and development. In the development of this category is divided into UI design, website development and maintenance, Android and IOS front-end backend. A reader who is working on the development of gaming sites told me that their company is learning the style of Xiaomi.Gaming websites must be beautiful, generous and good-looking in order to increase trust. Icons, fonts and typography are very particular.

– Graphic design of a gaming company –

At the management level, the gaming company is trying its best to give full play to the employee’s subjective initiative. Whenever they go to work at noon, the supervisor will lead all the staff to speak. Everyone called for slogans such as ” unity and forge ahead, hard work and hard work “ to make a strong momentum. After the vegetable farmer gets off work in the early hours of the morning, dozens of employees were surrounded by a circle to listen to the supervisor’s instructions. I heard the following paragraphs:

” You have come across the ocean to be here, can’t you be able to make a performance, can you afford yourself? Can you afford your parents? “

– A gaming company dormitory –

Severe punishment system is also a major feature of the gaming industry. In the Golden Triangle Special Zone, throwing cigarettes down from the balcony will be fined 3,000 yuan. If you don’t pay attention to table etiquette, you will be deducted 5,000 yuan. In addition, there is a benign competitive relationship between gaming companies. Companies often organize learning exchanges to jointly study new issues, new situations, and share profitability.

“In fact, we are really no different from domestic Internet companies. Our management system is much more powerful than domestic ones.” The readers are both proud and somewhat understated. “The only difference is that we are engaged in gambling, hehe.”

▶  40 million gamblers give birth to huge profits

Such a crazy phenomenon can not help but ask questions, why is the scale of the overseas gaming industry so large? Who has fed this group of people? It is said that there is a market for demand, and this principle is equally applicable in the gambling industry.

“China has more than one billion people, the population base is too big, and there are many people who want to gamble. I estimate that there are at least 40 million gambling dogs.” A man who has been engaged in the gaming industry for more than half a year told me, ” The average vegetable farmers who promotes well has hundreds of customers, although the customer has duplicates, but hundreds of thousands of farmers, you count yourself.”

The man was promoted last year at a gaming company in Sihanoukville. He has a total of less than 100 promoters, but the number of customers exceeds 10,000, and the monthly betting flow reaches more than 100 million yuan ( $14,887,500). If you use this to calculate the turnover of all the gaming companies in Southeast Asia, it will be an astronomical number.

– Gaming website advertising –

When talking about the prospects of the gaming industry, his confidence is very good: “The industry of gaming will never fall sharply. They want to bet, we have a market. Some people have quit, but there will be new people to gamble. In addition, gambling is the nature hidden in people, this nature can be tempted.”

Overseas gambling provides a platform for domestic gamblers. Those who did not have the opportunity to gamble now only need to log in to the gambling website with their mobile phones. The various ways of spoofing on gambling websites have left people who did not have gambling habits in a quagmire.

▶ The  ultimate black screen of the gaming industry: kill pigs!

Everything in the world can be explained by the existence of reasonableness, but reasonable does not mean that it will not harm the world. Compared to the physical casino’s signing and trading, the black screen of online gambling is even more horrible. One of the most famous is the “killing pig tray” .

Killing the pig tray, this name is too vivid. Pigs are of course gamblers, killing pigs, is a saying that when a gambler recharges a large amount of money on a gambling website, and not being able to claim any winnings.

If you want to kill a pig, you must raise the pig first. You can only slaughter it if you have a fattening. The way to raise pigs is varied. For example, the gaming company will find a beautiful, sexy and sultry young lady and fake an online romance. Every day she will appear online and tug at the ‘pigs’ heartstrings. This young lady often develops dozens of “lovers” at the same time. After a few months, she waits until she fully gains the trust of the other party, and induces the other party to recharge on the gambling website.

Another kind of higher success rate than “love” pig raising is the “base” pig raising . In order to kill pigs, the gaming company vigorously carried out the same-sex dating project. In the eyes of homosexuals, it is not easy to meet a close friend and it is easier to trust each other. When the killing of the pig was completed, it was discovered that the base friend was nothing but a stooge.

Of course, the regular killing pig does not play emotional cards. Instead, in the gambling, the gambler makes profits for a little bit, so that he can continue to taste the sweetness, trust the gambling website and promoters.

When the time is right, the promoters falsely claim that there are loopholes in the system, 20% of the large recharge, and 100% of a plan will win, and induce the gambler to recharge.

Another way to kill pigs is more straightforward – turn off the gambling site and take all the money of all customers.

– A gambling website operated in the Philippines-

When the killing of pigs is successful, it is the time when the banker and the vegetable farmer are cheering. In the gaming base of the Golden Triangle, once the successful killing of the pig company will set off firecrackers to celebrate, all employees have a party.

The readers who witnessed the firecrackers’ celebration told me: “When the firecrackers sounded, all the SAR’s gambling knows, the company killed the pigs. At this time, the heads of other companies will talk to staff: You look at the performance of the people, and kill a pig, you, you know the basic salary all day, do you have any interest?”

Compared to the killing of pigs, the degree of shading in the gaming industry is almost a small one. When the gambler is betting, the dealer controls the background control result, and they want you want to win, you will win, and if they you want to lose, you will lose. It is worth mentioning that another kind of gambling scam – Bao Ying plan, almost nakedly insults the IQ.

– “Southeast Asia Baoying Plan” at the exit of Sihanoukville Airport-

As the saying goes, ten gambling and nine loses, you tell me that you can make a profit? The betting company’s gameplay is to attract gamblers and casters by creating “gambling gods”. The so-called “gambling god”, a person has dozens of micro-signals, and different results in different gambling groups, there is always a guess. In addition, the Baoying plan also involves some seemingly feasible gambling, such as the double investment plan – first 100 yuan, 200 yuan , and 400 . For example, the third level of the three-continuous wins,means the assets can be turned over ten times.

As long as it is a person with normal intelligence, it will not be fooled.But the gambler’s thinking is different, because they always want to believe that they are not the pig. They believe that they will eventually be cared for by the goddess of luck. There are also some new gamblers who don’t understand the shady scene and can only let the dealers swindle wealth.

▶  Use the Chinese money to honor the local government

The reason why the online gaming industry is ruined is not only that it provides a gambling platform that is strictly prohibited by law, but also that it induces compatriot gambling through various means.

Chinese law prohibits gambling, including online gambling, so investors turn their attention to overseas, especially in corrupt Southeast Asian countries.

They are willing to accept the Chinese gaming industry. The government collects heavy taxes and officials receive red packets (bribes). Anyway, they earn Chinese money. Vegetable farmers can also stimulate local consumption. To put it bluntly, the Chinese gaming industry uses the money earned from the Chinese to honor the government of Southeast Asian countries.–

Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen has repeatedly publicly stated that he will crack down on the online gambling industry. The Chinese Embassy in Cambodia also made it clear that overseas gambling is illegal, but Cambodia’s Chinese gaming industry is still booming. In addition to occasional spot checks, the Cambodian government has no real impact on the Chinese gaming industry.

In the Golden Triangle of Laos, Chinese gaming companies are more stable, and the Golden Triangle is also known as a safe gaming base. Each betting company must pay 30% of the income tax, as well as rent, protection, and head tax.

The huge profits of the gaming industry are an important source of income for local managers. Without touching the core interests, no one will be able to withstand the money. And this money comes from the country and comes from countless families. The wealth accumulated by the two generations since (China’s economic) reform and opening up is being lost through online gambling, and its harm is comparable to that of opium.

▶The  gaming industry also has TMD poems and distant places.

Gaming is harmful, but it is difficult to eradicate. The Chinese police have repeatedly arrested gambling practitioners overseas, but it is difficult and costly to handle cases across the country. At Sihanoukville, a gambling practitioner bluntly said: “I will catch it, but can I catch it all? Tens of thousands of people are impossible. Now when we hear the wind, we are very Be vigilant, they all hide, and the wind will pass and continue.”

– Chinese police arrested betting practitioners in the territory · Picture @ Today Angkor-

Even when telecom fraud and stock frauds are caught, gambling practitioners will ridicule: “If you have safe spinach, you don’t plant it, do telecommunication fraud, and you should be caught.”

The vast overseas gambling industry is simply saying that Chinese people earn (fraud) overseas compatriots’ money overseas, and wool is on the sheep. Hundreds of thousands of relatively low-quality Chinese have flooded into the area, which has caused dissatisfaction among the people in the country to some extent, and there have been vicious incidents such as the slashing of Chinese by locals.

– Westport slashing Chinese incidents · Picture @ Today Angkor-

In a chat with experienced gambling practitioners, I learned a very interesting new trend. In recent years, the gaming industry has developed greatly, and the number of gaming companies has become saturated. Only the Chinese industry has limited profit margins. Investors are eyeing overseas markets – Europe, the United States, and Japan, and building gaming companies targeting Europe, America, and Japan are in the pipeline.

China’s online gambling industry is no longer satisfied with only harming its own people. They will also stage a squad and kill foreign pigs on a larger international stage. It seems that the locust’s dream is not only to destroy an acre of three-point land, it also has poetry and distance, as well as the stars and the sea.