Up until the scheme was thwarted by cutting-edge detective work, ruthless bikie gangs recruited housewives and the unemployed to launder drug money through pokie machines.
Drug traffickers employed the money-laundering mules to deposit filthy money into pokie machines in neighborhood bars, but they never used the machines themselves.
Instead, the mules would instruct the machine to print out a ticket detailing their credit balance, which they would then present to the cashier to receive their payment.
The technique, which enables the money to be cleaned and reported as gaming wins, is well-established and practically failsafe. It has been in operation for years.
However, the NSW Crime Commission took advantage of the epidemic lockdowns to develop new surveillance software that recorded pokie usage to take down the drug groups.
On October 11, when pandemic restrictions were released, the doors to clubs reopened, and they struck as the drug gangs attempted to wash a backlog of cash.
According to the Daily Telegraph, authorities tracked $5.5 million in allegedly dirty cash that was purportedly cleansed through the system at 178 locations using 132 different employees in just seven weeks.
The NSW Crime Commission, the Independent Liquor and Gaming Authority, and the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission organized the extensive collaborative operation.
However, the results of the inquiry imply that the scope of the issue might be beyond their capacity.
According to their assessment, “the data gathered offers little doubt that organized criminal gangs in NSW are using electronic gambling machines for large-scale money laundering.”
“The number of finds linked to both suspicious transactions and identified individuals is exceeding the amount of current resources available within the regulator to maintain the meticulous investigative methodology adopted thus far,” the statement continued.
According to the NSW Crime Commission, Covid prevented bikers from sending money gained from “huge quantities of illegal narcotics” at “extremely high drug pricing” to foreign countries.
But when the Covid limitations were repealed, they anticipated that a stream of ill-gotten gains would be cleaned up at the pokies as gaming establishments reopened.
The NSW government implemented a cutting-edge Centralized Monitoring System (CMS) as part of an undercover intelligence operation.
Authorities were able to view all 95,000 poker machines in NSW pubs and clubs’ historical and current transactions.
The technology focuses on indicators of fraud and money laundering, such as cash leaving machines without being used.
Using the CMS system, many investigative teams were put together to look at thousands of transactions between October 11 and November 29.
And what they discovered astounded them.
At one establishment in Fairfield, western Sydney, CCTV caught a group of housewives using poker machines to launder money before giving a man tickets to pay out.
In the video, five women were seen playing slots at the RSL club while being secretly handed cash by a man to put into the machines.
The women would pass the ticket to a separate male, who would cash it in, after the machine spat out a ticket.
Five unemployed males were part of another syndicate that was discovered operating out of a western Sydney bowling alley.
On camera, one individual can be seen inserting $5,000 into a machine and then withdrawing it.
Two other males can be seen acting as “lookouts” while the unemployed man fed the machines.
After the money is cleaned, the man runs into a fourth, unemployed man as they both make their way to a silver Toyota Camry to fetch a bag.
The criminal then takes the bag and puts it in a white Mazda being driven by a fifth man who is also unemployed.
One woman who frequents a well-known bowling alley in western Sydney was discovered to have ‘washed’ $33,000 using gaming machines in just two days without putting a single bet.
Although her action would have gone unnoticed for a long time, the CMS system detected her activities and ultimately caught her.
The probe also turned up a syndicate at St. Johns Park, where $45,000 in shady transactions were discovered over the course of a seven-week period.
The syndicate, run by a husband-and-wife team, is thought to have had more than 20 members operating across more than 20 locations.
According to an investigation into its operations, the syndicate has been active since 2014.
According to an early analysis, the syndicate may have swept away about $1 million.
Public distribution of the complete study is anticipated for August.