The UNODC says this helps criminals with little to no gaming or technical knowledge launch their own online casinos to mask their money moves.Īlso fueling much of the problem is the rise of hard-to-trace cryptocurrencies, said Amanda Gore, a forensic accountant who heads the Centre for Global Advancement, which studies financial crime in Asia and elsewhere. While meant for gambling, authorities across the region say the service is being used more and more to move and launder dirty money.Īnother major and growing concern is “white-labeling,” where all the sophisticated software and services needed to run an online gambling site can be bought from a provider and set up in a matter of weeks, much like a franchise. “High volumes of large, anonymous transactions, very limited regulation and compliance standards and the transboundary nature of services make the online gambling sector really attractive for people wanting to hide transactions,” he added.Īmong the sector’s most pernicious features, the UNODC says, is the practice of “offsetting,” where clients deposit money into a gambling operator’s account in one jurisdiction and draw an equal amount out of a second account in another jurisdiction but with the same operator’s help.

“Casinos have long played a role in money laundering in Southeast Asia, but the surge of online gambling has accelerated this in ways that weren’t expected,” Hofmann said.

Then came COVID-19, with its strict travel controls, turbocharging the industry’s shift to online gambling and giving the underground banking business a lift as well. Many gambling operators looking for countries with a lighter touch landed in the Mekong region. The UNODC says the region’s gambling industry got a big boost when China started cracking down on illegal gambling and cross-border money transfers about six years ago. What the findings show “is really a paradigm shift in how organized crime networks active in the Mekong have been using technology not just to expand their activities and revenue streams, but also to create a banking system to move these massive amounts of money around undetected,” Benedikt Hofmann, UNODC deputy representative for Southeast Asia and the Pacific, said. FILE - The Blue Shield casino operated by the Kings Romans Group stands in the Golden Triangle special economic zone on the banks of the Mekong river in Laos near the border between Laos, Myanmar and Thailand, March 2, 2016.

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