With a crackdown on gambling amid the FIFA World Cup, authorities in China have seized over $1.5 million in digital currency. Police started an investigation into the unnamed gambling site after ads said that the platform would “accept international recognized cryptocurrencies, including bitcoin, Ether and Litecoin,”
Different from other gambling sites, its profitability model set up a multi-tier pyramid-scheme that encourages staff (or “agents” as they call them internally) to bring in members which can increase commission and membership fee gains, and to acquire more cryptocurrency to hedge the platform’s loss risks by leveraging coin prices and other crypto-financial features.
It attracted more than 300,000 players from different countries, and 8,000 “agents” who earned commissions for recruiting new members through a pyramid scheme-like system
