(2nd right) Jauteh and police officials showing media some of the seized items.
KOTA KINABALU: An online gambling syndicate was busted with the arrest of nine people recently.
This syndicate known as Victory Kenny (VK) was found to have been operating as a call centre from an apartment unit in Benoni, Papar, not far from here for several months, offering online gambling sites, rewards, membership and other related services.
Sabah Police Commissioner Datuk Jauteh Dikun said the operators from the online gambling call centre would communicate with their customers via social media platforms such as WhatsApp, Telegram and Facebook.
“We busted this centre at 8.15pm on Oct 3, and its manager, 30, a technician, 31, and seven operators aged between 19 and 29,” he said in a press conference on Friday (Oct 20).
He said items such as units of computer sets, handphones, ATM cards and vehicles were confiscated while several bank accounts were frozen following the raid.
Jauteh said all seized items and frozen accounts were valued over RM700,841.
He said this is part of their latest four operations since June, where three other premises were also raided and over 30 suspects nabbed for similar offences.
“The three other cases comprise two in Penampang and one in Kota Kinabalu. The other offences include forex trading and scam pages selling non-existent items.
“We are still tracing the main account holders to some of these cases,” said Jauteh.
On related matters, he said Sabah police have made a total of 1,226 raids and arrested 1,500 suspects - 1,093 men and 413 women - for online gambling and gambling cases between Jan 1 and Oct 18 this year.
The total amount of items seized from these cases exceeded RM900,000, he said.
He said they were also monitoring mobile gambling activities and were working with the Malaysia Communication and Multimedia Commission on these cases.
