Up until the scheme was thwarted by cutting-edge investigative 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.
But the NSW Crime Commission used the pandemic lockdowns to prepare updated monitoring software which tracked the use of the pokies to defeat the drug gangs.
And when the doors to clubs re-opened after pandemic restrictions were lifted on October 11, they struck, just as the drug gangs tried to wash a backlog of cash.
According to the Daily Telegraph, authorities tracked $5.5 million in allegedly filthy currency that was purportedly cleansed through the system at 178 locations using 132 different employees in only 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 could 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.”
It added: ‘The number of findings relating to both suspicious transactions and identified individuals is exceeding the number of current resources available within the regulator to maintain the thorough investigative approach used thus far.’
NSW Crime Commission said Covid had hampered efforts by bikies to move money offshore made from ‘large quantities of prohibited drugs’ at ‘very high drug prices’.
But when the Covid limitations were repealed, they anticipated that a stream of ill-gotten gains would be cleaned up at the pokies when gaming establishments reopened.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 see 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 shocked them.
At one establishment in Fairfield, western Sydney, CCTV caught a group of housewives using poker machines to launder money before giving a guy tickets to pay out.
In the video, five ladies were seen playing slots at the RSL club while being discretely handed cash by a guy to insert into the machines.
The woman would pass the ticket to a separate male, who would pay it in, after the machine spat out a ticket.
Five jobless males were part of another gang that was discovered operating out of a western Sydney bowling alley.
One man is seen on CCTV putting $5,500 into a machine before cashing it out.
As the unemployed man fed the machines, two other men are seen operating as ‘lookouts’.
After the cash is washed, the man meets a fourth man, also unemployed, both heading to a silver Toyota Camry where a bag is retrieved.
The money launderer then proceeds to take the bag and place it in a white Mazda, driven by a fifth man, also unemployed.
In one instance a woman who is a regular at a popular western Sydney bowling club also was found to have ‘washed’ $33,000 using gaming machines, in just two days, without placing a single bet.
Although her action would have gone unnoticed for a long time, the CMS system detected her activities and finally 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 duo, is said to have had more than 20 members working over more than 20 locations.
According to an examination into its operations, the syndicate has been active since 2014.
According to an early analysis, the syndicate may have swept away around $1 million.
Public distribution of the complete study is anticipated for August.