China: largest fine for illegal gambling transfers

Chinabank Payments, a unit of e-commerce company JD.com, has been penalized for illegally transferring foreign currencies oversea

China.- China has imposed the largest financial fine to date on a third-party payment processor for its links to illegal gambling sites. 

According to local media, the amount that the accused part has to pay grows to RMB 29.4 million (€ 3.7 million). That is the fine on Internet Banking Online (Beijing) Technology Co Ltd, aka Chinabank Payments, a Beijing-based payment processor owned by JD Finance.

Chinabank was prosecuted for assisting mainland residents in transferring currency overseas. That included transferences to internationally licensed online gambling sites made between May 2017 and May 2018.

China’s Ministry of Public Security announced some weeks ago that it had investigated nearly 46000 cybercrime cases in the first 10 months of 2019. 5,797 of them involved online gambling.

“Chinabank Payments seriously reflected on our business management and carried out rectifications. We apologize for the negative impact we caused to the industry”, quoted a company’s spokesperson according to Reuters news agency. The statement added that the company had expelled the merchants involved in the case after an internal investigation found problems.

Chinabank Payments also said that in 2017 the platform had been negligent with some of its users’ access, which was then exploited by a number of external merchants to make illegal transactions.