0 Police nab trio behind Sumatra gambling syndicate

Police in North Sumatra say they are looking for the Riau man behind a sprawling illegal lottery syndicate that operates throughout Sumatra. Senior North Sumatra Police detective Adj. Sr. Comr. Andi Setiawan, said that the lottery, called toto locally, was conducted twice a day, five days a week in North Sumatra. All gambling is illegal under Indonesian law. Andi said that the lottery syndicate in North Sumatra was controlled by a 27-year-old woman bookmaker identified as Linda, alias Aling. “Aling, along with her two aides, was nabbed in Tebing Tinggi,” Andi said. 

“The three suspects are still undergoing police interrogation to bring their crimes to justice and to simultaneously uncover the extent of their syndicate in Riau and other cities in Sumatra,” he said. The trio was arrested by officers during a raid of their home in Tebing Tinggi, about 80 kilometers from Medan, the provincial capital, on Monday. Police also confiscated eight cellular phones, three bank savings books, four ledgers detailing the sales of lottery tickets and about Rp 4 million (US$410.68) in cash during the raid. Andry said that the suspects had confessed to operating the lottery from a base in Riau, where local police have been asked to arrest another syndicate chief who resides in Pekanbaru. 

The syndicate took in a large amount of money on a daily basis, according to the police. Andi said that Aling told detectives that she typically collected upwards of Rp 50 million a day. Local bookmakers forwarded proceeds to the mastermind in Riau on Tuesdays and Fridays, the days when the lottery was not held, the police said. The head of the anti-gambling unit at the North Sumatra Police, Sr. Comr. Saptono, said that gamblers typically placed bets ranging from Rp 100,000 to Rp 1 million by sending SMS messages to bookies, who forwarded the bets to the heads of the syndicate. 

The lottery was apparently a form of the venerable cut numbers game that emerged in the eastern US in the early 20th century. In the Sumatran version of the cut numbers game, winning lottery numbers were determined based on the sum of specific digits of the payoffs for winning horses in legal horse races in Hong Kong and Singapore. The lottery was held twice a day, at 6 p.m. local time, when the Singapore races were used to determine the winning number, and at 11 p.m., when the Hong Kong races were used, Saptono said.

source : the jakarta post