Macau’s casino industry reports 3,431 STRs marking highest number since 2006

According to data from Macau’s Financial Intelligence Office, the casino industry filed 3,431 suspicious transaction reports (STRs) in 2023, the highest in a single year since records began to be kept in 2006.

This quantity exceeded the levels seen in 2019, the year before the pandemic, by more than three times, and was even higher than the number for 2022, which was still influenced by Covid-19 travel restrictions.

A total of 74.4 percent of the 4,614 STRs filed in all sectors in 2023 were linked to casinos. The overall number of reports linked to casinos rose by 79.4% over the previous year, to 1,913, and by 191.5 percent year over year to 1,177 in 2022.

Regarding the revised figures, the Financial Intelligence Office remained silent. The gross gaming revenue (GGR) of Macau’s casinos for the year 2023 was MOP183.06 billion (US$22.73 billion), a remarkable 333.8 percent increase from the previous year.

Although the 2023 GGR accounted for 62.6 percent of the MOP292.46 billion recorded in 2019, the Financial Intelligence Office predicted in August that casino-sector STRs for 2023 would at least reach 2019 levels due to a recovery in gaming transactions and the implementation of more effective anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism financing (AML/CFT) controls.

Casino operators in Macau are required to report every transaction that exceeds the MOP500,000 (US$62,075 at the moment) level, sometimes known as the “large-transaction” threshold. However, suspicion is not necessarily raised by the fact that a transaction of this kind has been recorded.

The city’s Public Prosecutions Office received 116 reports of suspicious transactions from the Financial Intelligence Office in 2023; however, the update did not indicate which category of economic activity these reports belonged to—”games of fortune operators,” “financial institutions and insurance companies,” or “other institutions.”

Original story by: GGRAsia