Macau’s VIP gamblers aren’t being paranoid, Beijing really is watching them like a hawk.

Li Gang (pictured), director of Beijing’s liaison office in Macau, told the Beijing News that China’s crackdown on corruption had left public officials with no doubt that if they travel to Macau to gamble, “they will be discovered.” Li boasted that any public officials with even a hint of naughty conduct on their records “now dare not go to Macau to gamble.”

Without getting into specifics, Li said Beijing had put measures in place to ensure that no public official gets in or out of a Macau casino without being identified. Among these measures are identify checks that are now conducted for anyone wishing to gain access to a casino VIP table.

Such measures may be responsible for the reported revival by some Macau casino operators of proxy betting, in which a junket operator representative sits at the gaming table and relays play-by-play card information to a VIP on the mainland, who then advises the proxy how much to wager on any given hand.