China's police busted a total of 347,000 gambling cases involving more than 1 million people last year and retrieved 3.56 billion yuan (445 million U.S. dollars) of betting money, according to the Ministry of Public Security on Tuesday.

Police departments had specially targeted illegal private lotteries, gambling at overseas casinos, online betting and gambling cases involving Party cadres, said an official with the ministry.

The unhealthy gambling trend has been curbed and a long-term prevention and fight mechanism is taking form, the official said.

Gambling was outlawed on the Chinese mainland in 1949 when New China was founded.

Earlier reports estimated that a total of 600 billion yuan (75 billion U.S. dollars) had been bet overseas by last July, 15 times more than the amount spent each year on China's state-run lottery and equal to the annual revenue of the country's tourism industry.

There was no figure about illegal betting gains on China's mainland, but the China Center for Lottery Studies of Beijing University estimated that the revenue might be as much as 700 billion yuan (87.5 billion U.S. dollars) in 2005.

An amendment to the Criminal Law at the end of 2005 intensified punishment for illegal casino operators, who may face up to 10 years in prison, in addition to fines.

"It has provided us with a powerful legal weapon in the crackdown on gambling," the official said.

Source: Xinhua