The four-party payment gambling case in Inner Mongolia, China involves 2.95 billion yuan, with some commissions settled in USDT, and five individuals sentenced to 3 to 6 years in prison.

The Intermediate People’s Court of Xilingol League, Inner Mongolia, China, upheld the original judgment in the second-instance trial of Ma’s illegal business operation case. In this series of cases, Zhu and his accomplices set up a fourth-party payment platform to provide fund settlement services for overseas gambling websites. They processed settlements exceeding RMB 2.95 billion through 10 third-party payment companies and 105 merchants, generating illegal profits of approximately RMB 42.85 million. A unique aspect of the case is that some commissions were collected in virtual currencies such as USDT. The court confirmed that wallet addresses linked to Zhang and others repeatedly received and paid millions of USDT (equivalent to tens of millions of yuan), but the final determination of illegal profits was mostly based on the amount of illicit funds returned in RMB. Only Ma, who failed to return the illicit funds, was found to have illegal profits of RMB 2.95 million (calculated from approximately 4.67 million USDT received in the wallet, after deducting refunds). He was sentenced to four and a half years in prison, fined RMB 3 million, and ordered to forfeit his illegal gains. The other four defendants received sentences ranging from 3 to 6 years in prison. Public security authorities obtained evidence by retrieving wallet address data from Tether and transaction records from the OKX exchange. Experts pointed out that while virtual currencies are traceable on-chain, linking them to real-world individuals is difficult under non-real-name systems, and China lacks specialized audit institutions. As a result, the determination of the amount involved in such cases still largely relies on confessions.