With instances of police raiding betting arenas increasing every week, the bookies have found a new way to continue their illegal endeavours. Now the entire betting business has gone online and is conducted confidentially, with little or no fear of the law enforcers. On January 3, 2014, the crime branch of the Pune police arrested a bookie, Khushal Malad for operating a betting website called khelmasti.com. That set the police on the online trail, and the website was shut down. Recently, they found another site called bet5.co.uk brazenly operating.
Similar cases of online betting have also been detected in Mumbai, but the police are still in process of finding the culprits. “We earlier used to have various ways . However, the police started tracking our calls and even caught some of us. So we explored the relatively safer path of the virtual world,” said a bookie.
The writer is a freelance journalist.
