We approached 104 Human Bank, Taiwan's largest job bank, with curiosity about the rapid expansion of the online gambling industry. Jin Liming, the Senior Vice President of 104's Talent Recruitment and Management Division, who has been in the HR field for over twenty years, shared the significant changes he has witnessed recently.
Jin Liming mentioned that 104's Business Division Four specializes in recruiting software talent. Over the past three years, the gambling industry alone has jumped from making up one-tenth to one-quarter of Division Four's revenue.
The recruitment consultants at 104 Human Bank, responsible for Business Division Four, feel the same profound impact when discussing their online gambling industry clients. Jin Liming described, "Many of the Chinese bosses who come to us for recruitment assistance are very low-key. Their funding sources are unclear, the names on their business cards are not their real names, or they don't even hand out business cards, let alone leave any information or records."
During business discussions, one young Chinese business owner in his thirties once placed hundreds of thousands of yuan on the table, requesting recruitment for six companies in one go. According to the consultants, these Chinese business owners never bargain, emphasizing the importance of quickly assembling an operational team.
Standing at the forefront of the HR industry, they witness this speculative and unregulated industry growing rapidly. The industry's high profits have triggered a talent migration storm within the island.
Since around 2016, gambling companies have been offering salaries 1.3 to 1.5 times the market rate, attracting engineers from semiconductor, IC design, and gaming companies to switch careers. "Even our own engineers at 104 have been poached," Jin Liming said. These engineers are responsible for the industry's crucial product development, website maintenance, and security settings. The recruitment consultants at 104 Human Bank estimate that there are currently over 10,000 software engineers in the gambling industry, and if you include text-based customer service, the total number of employees is at least 20,000 to 30,000.
Regarding how many people are currently involved in Taiwan's online gambling industry, the newly established "International Association of Gambling Supplies and Services" confidently stated in an interview with its first chairman, lawyer Yang Mingxun, that 30,000 is a conservative estimate, and industry assessments suggest the number has already exceeded 100,000.
The Invisible Gambling Empire Taking Shape in Taiwan
According to investigations and visits by reporters from "The Reporter," these rapidly expanding online gambling companies are mainly disguised as "text-based customer service" and "software development" services; they are mostly clustered in Taipei's Neihu Science Park, which is jokingly referred to as "Gambling Street" by those in the industry.
When it comes to the actual appearance of these gambling companies, the recruitment consultants at 104 Human Bank avoid discussing client information. However, they emphasize that whether in commercial or residential areas, the gambling companies are hard to recognize. Their interiors are filled with OA office furniture and partitions, with no paper documents, as all information circulates online only.
In addition to Neihu, this industry has also blossomed in multiple locations, from New Taipei City's Banqiao and Xindian to Taichung's Xitun, Chiayi City, and Kaohsiung City, and even within the Taipei 101 building. The employees and managers of several gambling companies we contacted do not wear name tags or carry business cards, keep a low profile, and always choose coffee shops hundreds of meters away for meetings. However, spending an afternoon with them in a cafe, one can hear whispers about gambling at the next table.
A large number of Taiwanese talents support a "Gambling Empire" facing Chinese gamblers. What role do Taiwanese talents play in this empire that sees daily inflows of millions of yuan, and why has Taiwan become a hub for the gambling empire?
The rapidly rising Chinese market is the key.
Despite the Chinese government's explicit ban on gambling, which adheres to strict "personalism" (meaning that gambling is illegal regardless of location), the economic power and rapid internet growth have not diminished the desires of Chinese gamblers. Their previous bets in physical casinos in Las Vegas, Macau, and Singapore are now shifting to the convenient online betting. The development of the online gambling industry has become a lucrative opportunity for various financiers.
In the millennium, the Philippines allowed the development of gambling in special zones, issuing legal licenses, attracting investors with substantial funds to move forward, transferring the highest-risk operations such as promotion, marketing, machine operation, and management from casinos to this region. After completely breaking through regional restrictions, they also invested millions of dollars to obtain gambling licenses, purchasing land and properties, and recruiting workers from various places to execute operations in the Philippines.
The convenient online mechanisms allow Chinese gamblers to connect to a remote IP address, register an account, and make payments through third-party services to bet on poker, roulette, slot machines, racing, and sports events; they can even gamble against scantily clad bunny dealers via video. In recent years, young female dealers, previously mostly Filipino girls, now increasingly include Taiwanese and Japanese faces.
The Low-Key Chinese Bosses Holding Billions in "Flow"
Among this large group of investors, Chinese bosses are the main force.
When discussing these low-key and deep-pocketed behind-the-scenes financiers, interviewees stated that most of the financiers are Chinese or "of different nationalities" but Chinese, with many originally from Fujian province.
"Half of the bosses I know are from Anxi, Fujian. They mostly started working abroad in their teens, made money, and climbed onto the high platform of gambling, bringing their families along to strive together. In their companies, uncles, aunts, cousins, and nieces work in different positions, facilitating centralized management and mutual trust due to kinship. Another group of bosses are former IT personnel from Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent, who became wealthy through investing in physical casinos," explained a senior executive who has been immersed in the industry for a long time.
Whether they are wealthy landowners or tech people, these Chinese bosses have rapidly replicated hundreds of online gambling websites in a short period, drawing in tens of billions of yuan as "flow" and accumulating substantial capital. Many bosses frequently bribe Philippine officials, also engage in the sex industry or real estate speculation, and illegally transfer funds across borders.
To combat illegality, in 2017, the Chinese Ministry of Public Security began cooperating with the Philippine government, even directly deploying public security officers to Manila. According to China's state media Xinhua, from 2017 to mid-2018, Chinese public security had cracked over 7,000 cases of cross-border gambling, seizing 11 billion yuan related to gambling. The Chinese Ministry of Public Security also claims that cross-border online gambling is a crime that "endangers economic and financial security, damages the national image, and destabilizes society."
Last year (2018), Beijing's "The Beijing News" revealed that thousands of young Chinese people were lured to Manila by local intermediaries with high salaries, working like slaves in unlicensed casinos, their passports confiscated by employers, and signing unreasonable work contracts. The Chinese Embassy in Manila even issued a warning to its citizens about working in the Philippines.
The Harsh Reality Behind the "Philippine Dream" Achieved Through High CP Value
Under the tightening policies of China, Taiwan is also affected.
Originally employed Chinese workers in the Philippines, due to high legal risks and rising wages, multinational Chinese bosses began to replace them with cheaper Taiwanese labor.
Additionally, Taiwanese people's "gentle" speech and service, along with their not-so-high salaries, are also favored by Chinese bosses. Starting from text-based customer service and working in the gambling industry for nine years, TOM (pseudonym) pointed out that most Taiwanese are bilingual in Chinese and English, yet their salary demands are not high, unlike young people from China or the Philippines, who not only have low loyalty but often fail to meet language proficiency standards. "A qualified Taiwanese customer service can be hired for just over 40,000 yuan, which is very cost-effective for the bosses," TOM said.
A National Taiwan University graduate who switched from being a media industry engineer to this field, Changxin (pseudonym) also explained, "Targeting Taiwanese engineers is also because their salaries are generally low, engineers can be on call at any time, their technical conditions are good, and they have high CP value. Moreover, Taiwan's gambling industry research and development technology has been leading globally since the early days."
Not only did Changxin join the industry, but he also introduced several colleagues. He mentioned that in recent years, many slightly experienced Taiwanese engineers have chosen to come here, setting up websites, developing gambling games, maintaining stability for millions of users online simultaneously. The work content is not much different, but it can exchange for double the salary. However, the only difference is that they never proactively mention their involvement in the gambling industry to others.
Due to the urgent need for talent, Taiwanese media sensed a change in the atmosphere. After 2015, financial media once unveiled the faces of young people who moved south to the Philippines for economic prospects from the perspective of fulfilling their dreams in the Philippines.
At the same time, the online gambling industry also benefits from the injection of Taiwanese talent, leading many senior executives in the industry to commonly refer to Taiwan as "the heart of the Asian gambling industry." Without Taiwan's role, the gambling industry would collapse. Key machines and operation centers are set up in the Philippines, while back-office customer service, engineers, and designers are based in Taiwan, outsourced by Taiwan. A gambling map of "cross-national and cross-border cooperation" to reduce operating costs and risks thus came into being.
The successful model of China-Philippines-Taiwan has also begun to be replicated in countries like Cambodia and Myanmar in recent years. A senior executive from one of the top four gambling groups in Asia revealed that he had personally traveled to Myanmar to negotiate with local warlords, hoping to use this cross-national gambling industry chain to attract more local gamblers.
