Online sports betting operator Pinnacle Sports’ new owners have unveiled their plans for world domination.

One of the oldest and most celebrated of online bookmakers, Pinnacle announced last month that unidentified parties had taken a “controlling interest” in the Curacao-licensed outfit. On Tuesday, Pinnacle revealed that the deal had been consummated in August 2014, although the exact identities of the new ownership remain a mystery. For what it’s worth, the legal firms that advised the new owners on the sale were based in Ireland and the UK.

In a statement, Pinnacle CEO Paris Smith claimed to be “extremely excited” to be working with the new owner(s) on a “shared vision” that includes “significant product enhancement and expansion into regulated territories.” Smith promised “cutting-edge” new products were being readied for the “concerted drive into new global markets.”

Customers will hope the new owners have extra deep pockets, as governments in European regulated markets tend to view online gambling operators as piggy banks. So costs will go up and margins will go down. But Smith assured customers that “the fundamental principles that make the brand so unique will not be compromised.”

Pinnacle appeared to be taking a shift away from regulated markets last year, withdrawing from the UK market before the Sept. 15 deadline for new licensing imposed by the UK Gambling Commission. The year before that, Pinnacle returned the online gambling license it had been issued by the Alderney Gambling Control Commission (AGCC).

Both of those moves followed Pinnacle being named in a late-2012 indictment by US authorities that linked the site to an illegal messenger betting ring connected with former Cantor Gaming VP Michael Colbert. Pinnacle withdrew from the US market in 2007 but introduced new IP-blocking of US accounts following the indictment. Members of Pinnacle’s previous ownership named in the indictment have since seen their charges either dropped or drastically reduced.

Pinnacle’s new strategy may see it eventually welcomed back into markets that had previously blacklisted the site, including Bulgaria, which tagged a scarlet letter on Pinnacle in July 2013. Russia, which blacklisted Pinnacle in March 2014, is reportedly planning to institute a legal online sports betting regime this June, although who gets to participate remains murky. In case it needs saying, American bettors aren’t advised to hold their breath for a return of Pinnacle to US shores.

Authorities in China have broken up an international online gambling operation based in Hunan province.

China’s official press agency Xinhua quoted Chinese police saying they’d detained 19 individuals following a two-month investigation. A further eight individuals have been targeted for arrest over their roles in the operation of the Shenbo Sun City website, whose servers were based outside the country.

Police said the operation earned a profit of RMB 1.4b (US $$223m) between May 2013 and Oct 2014. Police have frozen approximately 1,000 bank accounts across China containing around RMB 200m. This marks China’s second major bust of 2015, having taken down a similarly large operation in Shandong province in January.

Over in South Korea, authorities have arrested two ‘cyber security experts’ accused of targeting an online gambling site with distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks. Intriguingly, the hackers were hired by another illegal online gambling operator intent on eliminating his competition.

The Korea Times quoted the National Police Agency saying a man named Yang, the owner of an online security company, was paid a hefty KRW 1b (US $911k) since May 2014 to target the online gambling operator’s competitor on multiple occasions. Neither site operator was publicly identified by police.

On Sept. 25, Yang reportedly hacked into 12k computers and commanded them to spam the targeted site with messages in order to crash its servers. Yang told police he’d agreed to don the black hat because his legal sources of income were “unstable.” Police are continuing to investigate to determine what other DDOS attacks Yang and his henchman might have launched.