One Gaming Site Became Several, and What Came Out of Them Was 145 Kilograms of Untaxed Tobacco Alongside the Card Tables: CFSEU-BC Charges Shahrouz Younesi, 54, and Xiaoyi “Karen” Zhang, 46, Three and a Half Years After JIGIT Opened the File (Originally Reported September 3, 2026)

LOWER MAINLAND, B.C. — This file was published on Wednesday, September 3, 2026 and is not a story that broke today. The Joint Illegal Gaming Investigation Team went looking at one illegal gaming site in March 2023. By the time the BC Prosecution Service signed off on charges forty-one months later, the file had grown into investigations of multiple gaming houses, and the inventory of what investigators took out of them included a hundred and forty-five kilograms of tobacco that had never been stamped for tax.

That last item is the one worth pausing on. A card table and a cash float are what anyone would expect from an illegal gaming house. A hundred and forty-five kilograms of untaxed tobacco is a second business running in the same room.

Two Charges, One of Them Not About Gambling at All

Section 201(1) of the Criminal Code is the keeping-a-common-gaming-house offence, and both accused face it. Only Younesi faces the second charge, and the second charge is a tobacco offence: the sale of unstamped tobacco products under section 121.1(1).

Unstamped means the excise stamp that certifies duty has been paid is not on the package. That is the mechanism by which contraband tobacco is contraband — not the leaf, the tax. The 145 kilograms sitting in the seizure list is the physical form of that charge.

CFSEU-BC does not say the tobacco was being sold at the gaming houses, does not say where it was stored, and does not put a dollar figure on it. What the force does is list it in the same inventory as the gaming tables and the $240,000, and lay a tobacco charge against one of the two people it has charged with running the tables.

The Forfeiture Went Through Before the Prosecution Started

The sequence in this release runs the opposite way to most seizure files. Charges were approved on August 26, 2026. The proceeds and equipment, CFSEU-BC says, have already been forfeited to the Province of British Columbia.

That is civil forfeiture doing its work on a separate track from the criminal charge, and it is why the release can state the outcome for the money in the past tense while the outcome for the two accused remains a future court date. Neither Younesi nor Zhang has had an allegation tested.

The assisting-agency list is the other tell about what kind of file this is. Two police forces appear on it — Burnaby RCMP and the Vancouver Police Department — and so do the Integrated Emergency Response Team, the BC Ministry of Finance and the Canada Revenue Agency. A gaming house investigation that needs a revenue agency and a provincial finance ministry at the table is an investigation about money movement, not about card games.

What the Force Says, and What It Does Not

Sgt. Sarbjit K. Sangha is quoted saying the investigation highlights the scale and complexity of illegal gaming operations and the significant resources required to disrupt them, and that the charges, seizures and forfeitures reflect the work of investigators and the strength of the unit’s partnerships.

What the release does not do is attach this file to anything larger. CFSEU-BC exists to fight organized crime in British Columbia, and JIGIT was stood up specifically because illegal gaming is a place organized crime keeps money. Neither of those facts is a finding about these two accused, and CFSEU-BC has named no criminal organization here. None is named in this briefing either.