policE said they had arrested 85 people linked to two “exceptionally large-scale” betting rings worth a combined US$133mil (RM542.5mil), as the government cracks down on illegal gambling during the World Cup.
The raids in late June targeted two rings with an “exceptionally large scale of operation” and a “high level of hierarchy and tight control”, police in Ho Chi Minh City said in a statement yesterday.
Since October 2025, the rings had logged an estimated US$133mil in illegal transactions, the statement said.
Leaders of the rings confessed to receiving “master-level betting accounts from individuals in Cambodia... subdividing these accounts into numerous agent and member accounts to distribute to gamblers” online, it added.
Vietnam’s public security ministry said last week police had dismantled 73 gambling operations across the country, arresting 346 suspects involved in illegal gambling and football betting during the first 20 days of the World Cup.
“Transaction money in these cases totalled thousands of billions of dong (or hundreds of millions of dollars)“, said Colonel Bui Tuan Anh of the public security ministry. — AFP
