What are gambling cards and how would they stop money laundering?
The gaming industry in Australia is debating a proposed new prepaid gaming card to be voted on and accepted in the New South Wales territory that would help consumers stay in control of the amount spent and their overall gaming habits.Gambling operators have argued that the proposed measure would cost thousands of jobs and would further complicate the situation by costing $ 1.8 billion.
Patricia Bergin, the lead researcher investigating Crown Casino, a cashless gambling solution would potentially reduce damage and all players would have to load their cards before playing. She believes these cards can help combat another big problem in the Australian gambling landscape, money laundering. Organized criminal groups have been using slot machines and "mules" to circulate their dirty money around Australia, a very worrying issue. The prepaid card will eliminate much of the money laundering, giving the tax office more power to identify suspicious behavior and discrepancies in a person's total income and expenses, and will also make it more difficult for people to overspend.
Players would need a card to play on a machine
The government has proposed that all "gaming machine" players pre-register and load money onto a government-regulated card that would function similarly to the state's cashless Opal cards, which are for public transportation.
This would reduce both the damage of gambling and money laundering in New South Wales, which has been dubbed by the director of the Alliance for Gaming Reform, Tim Costello, as the "non-gambling capital of the world casino". The card would be monitored by the Privacy Commissioner and linked to the state's existing opt-out registry, which is designed to prevent thousands of self-excluded players from accessing the poker machines.
Between July and December 2020, the total profit from gaming machines was $ 4.4 billion, up from $ 4 billion in the last six months of 2019, despite the fact that pub and club trading stopped due to to the restrictions imposed to stop the spread of the coronavirus.
Money laundering in Melbourne and Perth casinos
In a report by Commissioner Bergin on Crown's suitability to hold the license for its new $ 2.2 billion Barangaroo casino, it was found that Crown Sydney was not the "right person" to hold a casino license. The report showed that Crown's gaming machines had been used to launder money at its Melbourne and Perth casinos, leading to the proposal for the online prepaid card.
Commissioner Bergin refers to the game card as a "powerful" tool to address the major issues facing the industry. It seems clear how useful the card is to help problem gamblers and it is also obvious that it would be a powerful mechanism to help combat money laundering.
The first prepaid online gaming card
This is the first proposal in the world to create cashless game cards that will connect a player's identity with their preloaded money and will be accessible by a relevant government regulatory body and pub or club.
Also Nova Scotia in Canada tried a game card program in 2014, but eventually dropped out. Nova Scotia's program was not linked to identity, so players were able to circumvent the system by trading, sharing, and accumulating multiple cards.
Which are the next steps? Will a card be introduced?
Thanks to an unlikely alliance between the Greens and One Nation's Mark Latham, Dominello's Customer Service Minister seems to have enough support in the upper house to suggest that the card reform could be passed, but it will take a long time, because Labor remains divided on this issue.
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