Earlier this month the Gambling Commission, the industry regulator, fined Coral bookmakers £90,000 in profits it made from one drug dealer who had laundered almost £1m in its shops. Last month the industry regulator also publicly admitted what has long been privately acknowledged: FOBTs present a "high inherent money-laundering risk".
The machines take £200 at a time. This would have been mostly in £10 and £20 notes. It's not clear from the article if the launderer put the whole £1m through the machines, or "just" £90k.
Dealers feed their drug money through the machines, losing a little and then cashing out with the vast majority of their stake, James says. They can then collect a printed ticket showing they have gambled that day – meaning that if stopped by police, they can answer questions about why an apparently unemployed young man carries hundreds of pounds in rolled-up cash.
Comments
Speaking of drugs, and registry, one big problem would be its an extremely expensive small time form of money laundering.
The way to destroy money laundering would be to eliminate small returns of $2 on a $1 ticket (at maybe 5% odds).
The lottery is a very expensive way to get clean traceable money, but often enough not much clean traceable money is required.
I used to think it'd be weird for criminals to use gambling to launder money - it'd be too expensive. But then I heard about FOB machines.
The UK has something called "fixed odds betting machines". These are sometimes used to launder money.
http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/nov/08/gambling-mach...
The machines take £200 at a time. This would have been mostly in £10 and £20 notes. It's not clear from the article if the launderer put the whole £1m through the machines, or "just" £90k.
Either way, it's a lot of cash.