More than 5,000 Chinese citizens left Maijayang yesterday after the Chinese and Myanmar governments cracked down on casinos in the border city. Several Chinese teenagers have been abducted recently in Maijayang. To stop gambling Myanmar has shut down the casinos in Maijayang and China has cut off power, water, telecommunications and even paths to the town which sits on the Sino-Burma border, Beijing News reported.

The State Government will consider reciprocal bans on shady gamblers after revelations that the brother of notorious drug lord Tony Mokbel is among Queensland’s biggest casino punters. Horty Mokbel, brother of the captured crime czar and an alleged drug trafficker, has been barred from Melbourne’s Crown Casino because of money-laundering fears. But he has been revealed as a high-roller at the Gold Coast’s Jupiters Casino in a secret list of Queensland’s biggest gamblers obtained by The Courier-Mail.

At the Moc Bai border gate in the southern province of Tay Ninh there are over ten groups of ‘brokers’ who bring Vietnamese gamblers to Cambodia’s casinos. Every weekend, 600-700 cross the border for gambling. At a very hot noon of Tay Ninh as a coach from HCM City’s Ben Thanh to Tay Ninh’s Moc Bai has just stopped, tens of young men surrounded the coach and delivered name cards of Cambodian casinos to passengers.

Foreign casinos along Chinese borders have either been forced to shut down or go underground because of crackdowns by police and their collaboration with foreign counterparts. The number of such casinos has shrunk from 149 – many of them illegal – in 2005 to 28 now. Of those still in business, nine are in the southwestern border area with Myanmar and Vietnam and the remaining along the northern border with Russia, according to the Ministry of Public Security.