After a group of 48 Chinese and Taiwanese citizens were arrested on Thursday in Jimbaran by Ngurah Rai immigration officers, more information is surfacing about the conditions of their arrest.
Our favorite new scoop is that they apparently played a game of hide and seek before getting caught.
Acting on suspicions that the Chinese and Taiwanese citizens were violating their tourist visas, immigration went to check out the villa they were staying at on Jl. Goa Gong, Jimbaran on Thursday.
When the 14 officers started searching the four-story villa, it seemed very empty—but they finally caught dozens of people hiding in the villa’s bathroom, according to Tribun Bali.
After some investigating, immigration says it appears the 48 people had set up a scam using an online gambling operation and had headquartered themselves in Jimbaran.
The immigration raiders apparently had no idea what that they were walking such a big illegal gambling operation—they had just been acting on visa violation suspicions.
“The raids that we did were not linked to cases of alleged gambling and fraud,” Head of Supervision and Enforcement of Immigration in Ngurah Rai, Muhammad Sholeh told Tribun Bali.
“We are conducting an investigation. If found to have violated immigration rules, they will be forcibly repatriated. As for the allegations as part of them working on an international online gambling scam, that’s under the authority of the police to investigate,” says Sholeh.
During the raid, officers reportedly found a number of IT devices, including 35 laptops, 27 mobiles phones, 85 wifi routers, and 59 internet modems.
Illustration: Wikimedia Commons
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