"Where Africa Comes to Stay Informed."
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"Where Africa Comes to Stay Informed."
Criminals are pushing dirty money through betting sites and video-game economies, the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) has warned, using gambling platforms to shift funds without ever placing a serious wager and breaking large sums into small transfers to slip past monitoring systems.
The global anti-money laundering body says the sectors have opened up fresh avenues for abuse as the market has grown worldwide, play has moved online, and payment tools have made it possible to move value quickly, anonymously and across borders.
Technology, the Paris-based organization said, has produced tangled ecosystems that regulators and investigators struggle to see into — sprawling across online, cross-border and multi-payment environments. Because gaming and gambling now sit inside the wider digital economy, they hand criminals several different doors into the formal financial system.
The warning rests on a project that ran for a year and pulled in submissions from more than 80 jurisdictions along with industry groups and academic researchers. It looked at financial crime exposure across casinos, betting activity and video gaming, and was the first time FATF has examined online and illegal gambling in detail.
Out of that work came a fresh set of risk indicators, published to help governments, regulators and firms recognize and act on money laundering, terrorist financing and proliferation financing threats in a corner of the economy that is changing fast. Among the warning signs flagged: money cycled through a platform with little or no genuine play, deposits deliberately broken into small amounts to avoid triggering alerts, and outsized or suspiciously coordinated bets on matches already under scrutiny for possible manipulation.
Unlawful gambling emerged as one of the biggest dangers the study identified. In plenty of countries the illegal market matches the licensed one in scale, and in some places outstrips it. Unlicensed operators turn up everywhere, FATF noted, whether or not gambling is lawful locally and regardless of how tightly it is regulated.
Offshore sites without a license frequently dress themselves up as above-board businesses, the body said, dangling anonymity and generous incentives that appeal to ordinary punters and criminals alike.
The ways money enters and leaves these platforms — cash, e-wallets, mobile money and virtual assets — carry laundering risk of their own, according to the report.
Nor do the platforms operate alone. FATF stressed that they lean on a long supporting cast: social media companies, digital marketplaces and software developers among them. Many of those players sit outside current regulatory perimeters, which leaves further openings for abuse.
Inconsistent rules from one country to the next are part of the problem, the watchdog said, and they hamper the response as much as they enable the crime.
“Criminals and illegal operators can exploit differences in regulatory approaches across jurisdictions. These differences can also create barriers to information sharing between private and public sectors and challenges in international co-operation,” it said.
Ownership structures add another layer. FATF cautioned that shareholdings in platforms can be arranged to fall below the thresholds that would trigger regulatory checks — a tactic that works best where anti-money laundering and counter-terrorist financing (AML/CFT) controls and anti-corruption safeguards are already weak.
The study also underlined a long-standing danger that has not gone away: criminal groups taking a stake in operators, or gaining sway over how they are run. Brick-and-mortar casinos have faced such attempts for decades, FATF noted, and the risk only grows online, where ownership chains are harder to untangle.
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