According to the Macao Daily News, Chen Ronglian, the head of the Dejin Group, has been charged with 83 crimes including a criminal group, and the case will be tried on December 5. He was charged with 83 counts, including criminal syndicates, illegal gambling in licensed places, fraud, and money laundering.
The amount involved was 30.9 billion yuan, and the illegal income was 1.3 billion yuan
According to the prosecution, on November 27, 2021, the police arrested Zhou Zhuohua, the head of Sun City Group. In order to avoid the involvement of his own Dejin Group, Chen Ronglian closed the group in December, ordered his subordinates to burn some of the documents, and drilled the core area of the main server's mobile hard drive, but still could not escape the law.
The Macao Police Department held a press conference on January 30 this year to disclose that on January 28, a suspect surnamed Chen and a suspect surnamed Cai were intercepted at the hotel in Macao's New Port Area, and then arrested them on suspicion of illegal gambling and money laundering, and the two refused to cooperate during the interrogation. After searching their cotai residence and imperial office, the police department found a large amount of evidence of crimes, including HK$4.1 million (about 3.34 million yuan) in cash, computers, servers, etc. According to media reports, the suspect surnamed Chen who was arrested was Chen Ronglian, the husband of the entertainer An Yixuan, who was accused of illegally operating online gambling.
On August 4, Chen Ronglian was formally sued. According to media reports, according to the indictment, Chen Ronglian is suspected of committing the crime of "performing the leadership or command duties of a mafia organization", which can be punished with a maximum sentence of 15 years, plus gambling, money laundering, refusal to cooperate with the investigation, etc., and the sentence may exceed 20 years.
According to the prosecutor's disclosure, Macau Dejin Group also operates telephone betting "Fast Teleports" and "Video Teleports" in Macau, and through gambling web pages and mobile applications, it will broadcast live gambling activities operated in the Philippines and other places, allowing gamblers to gamble in different locations such as Macao and the mainland. At the end of 2020, an indictment in a case in Wuxi City, Jiangsu Province, pointed out that Macau Dejin Group was suspected of colluding with mainland personnel to open casinos in the mainland. The indictment states that Dejin agreed to pay dividends with the defendants who took shares, and conspired to set up an illegal gambling website in the mainland, and Dejin provided a website and a teleportation account to transmit the gambling footage of the Dejin Hall in Manila, Philippines, to the mainland in real time.
In order to evade the supervision and inspection of the Bo Regulatory Bureau, the Group provided false financial statements under the operation of Chen Ronglian. In the past six years, Chen Ronglian has earned at least about HK$1.5 billion (about 1.3 billion yuan) of improper benefits through the total number of transcoding codes of about HK$34.9 billion and a total of about RMB30.9 billion through the "gambling bottom surface", and four Bo enterprises have submitted civil damages claims.
The road to the beginning of "Minnanzai"
Chen Ronglian's hometown is Jinjiang, Fujian Province, which is an authentic Minnanzai.
Chen Ronglian's father has a younger brother who develops in Macao, and will send money to the family every month, seeing the amount of payment given by his uncle, Chen Ronglian, who can only take 300 yuan per month in the local area, has the idea of going to Macao to find gold.
In the early 1990s, he first worked as a waiter in a casino in Macau, and his dream at that time was to become a dealer (also known as Zhuang Ho, a profession in the casino responsible for issuing cards and recovering the chips lost by guests).
You know, the monthly income of the dealer in the casino can reach fifty thousand. However, this is not a small difficulty for Chen Ronglian, who has a Minnan accent. People in Macau casinos like to call Chen Ronglian, a Minnan who came from Fujian, "MinnanZai". In order to get rid of the image of "Min Nan Zai", who only speaks Hokkien dialect, Chen Ronglian once practiced Cantonese hard.
In the 1980s and 1990s, the casino VIP business arose in Macau, giving rise to a new profession, stacking yard boys. Stacked code boy is the intermediary between the casino VIP hall and the gambler, on the one hand, to attract customers, from which to earn commissions, on the other hand to lend to gamblers, eat interest difference. They usually wear decent clothes and wait like live taxi drivers to guard Macao's immigration gates, high-end hotels and other places.
Chen Ronglian transformed from a waiter into a stacked yard boy in a casino, and gradually attracted many mainland rich people to gamble through the Fujian Hometown Association.
In order to collect loans, this "Minnanzai" did everything to the extreme. If the debtor was unable to repay the money for a short period of time, Chen Ronglian sent someone to forcibly supervise the debtor and confiscate the debtor's belongings. In addition to restricting the personal freedom of debtors, Chen Ronglian would also use beatings, intimidation and other means to force debtors to raise money to repay debts, and in this way, Chen Ronglian quickly accumulated wealth.
After marrying a female star, she began to show off her wealth in a high profile
Before marrying female star An Yixuan, Chen Ronglian had always acted low-key, and his name was not known to outsiders. Until 2017, when he married An Yixuan, this low profile was completely broken.
In June of that year, the two held a grand "wedding of the century" in Hawaii, which made entertainment headlines for several consecutive days.
After marriage, An Yixuan occasionally showed off his life on social media.
In addition to enjoying a high-profile life, Chen Ronglian also made high-profile donations and materials, packaging himself as a charity entrepreneur. On the 2017 Bazaar Star Charity Night, Mr. and Mrs. An Yixuan donated 4.2 million yuan. In 2019, Chen Ronglian donated libraries to 29 schools in his hometown of Yonghe Town, Jinjiang.
On the table, he packaged himself as a philanthropic entrepreneur. Privately, he began to extend his money-making hand to some "gray-black fields."
In recent years, the gambling industry has suffered a major setback due to the impact of the epidemic. In order to make money, Chen Ronglian began to play the idea of the Internet, setting up gambling websites in the mainland to attract mainland netizens to participate in online gambling. In order to evade the police investigation, most of his gambling platforms are registered abroad, but he still has not escaped legal sanctions.
In recent years, cross-border gambling and online gambling groups have become increasingly prominent in the illegal phenomenon of mainland citizens bidding and gambling, breeding a series of vicious cases such as money laundering, illegal detention, kidnapping, and homicide, which are of great harm.
In order to evade legal supervision, overseas gambling groups often set up servers abroad, implant black links to websites through domestic fake base stations, send group text messages, or use fake WeChat groups, QQ groups and other means to promote publicity. With high returns and high winning rates, they lure domestic gamblers to join. However, gambling groups often modify the winning rate by artificially manipulating the background, first giving new members a little sweetness to lure them into the bait, letting new members win money first, and then when they invest large amounts of money, they will take all the money away. Gambling groups often restrict gamblers to a certain amount of money to withdraw cash, thereby prolonging gambling time, increasing the number of gambling, and eventually depleting all the gamblers' funds.
Source: China Net, Global Net, Global People
Column Editor-in-Chief: Liu Lu Text Editor: Lu Xiaochuan
Source: Author: Shangguan He