Australia’s financial intelligence unit, AUSTRAC, has expanded a partnership designed to fight back against financial crime, including illegal gambling scams.
The Fintel Alliance, established in 2017, is a private-public partnership between Australia’s law enforcement agencies and major banks, remittance service providers and gambling operators.
Following “significant law enforcement outcomes” due to the work of the alliance, AUSTRAC is now increasing its capacity through the establishment of a collaborative data analytics hub, a platform for data sharing which helps to identify criminal patterns and trends across the financial sector.
In addition, the Fintel Alliance’s capacity will be increased through additional staff, including a seconded senior manager from ANZ Bank who will help co-lead and build new pairings with the industry and government members.
“All members of Fintel Alliance continue to prioritise fighting financial crime and have strengthened our contribution to the collective effort – to prevent our businesses being infiltrated by organised crime, to protect our customers from being exploited, and to drive crime out of our communities,” said ANZ’s Group Head of Financial Crime Risk, Cassandra Hewett.
Scambling
AUSTRAC praised in particular a campaign against ‘scambling’, a practice where unlicensed online gambling platforms advertise on social media and trick people into visiting scam websites to participate in gambling.
Through the collaborative data analytics hub, the alliance collected all cash deposit transaction data under AU$10,000 from four of Australia’s largest banks and searched for criminal patterns. In doing so, the AUSTRAC was able to identify a number of criminal networks.
“The nature of scambling – frequent small transactions – means it isn’t traditionally captured by mandatory reporting,” explained Paul Jevtovic, Chief Financial Crime Risk Officer at NAB. “However, combining data from multiple sources about cash transactions less than $10,000 allowed Fintel Alliance to more rapidly understand the nature and extent of criminality resulting in timely dissemination amongst members.”
According to AUSTRAC, scammers have been targeting regional and remote Aboriginal communities, and the Fintel Alliance is now working with police, banks and other industry partners to raise awareness of scambling among vulnerable Australians.
Poker raids
The expansion of the task force against financial crime comes at a time when the debate surrounding the regulation of the gambling industry in Australia continues to rage on.
Michael Phelan, the former Head of the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission (ACIC), warned that the market is edging towards a dangerous tipping point due to excessive regulation.
Speaking at Sydney’s Regulating the Game conference, Phelan said: “The issue is that if the market or taxation gets to a point beyond the equilibrium – if you get to a point where you tax the industry so much and you overregulate – then people will look to other markets to go to and we’ve seen that happen in [the Australian tobacco] industry where regulation falls off a cliff and you have zero visibility.”
His words were followed by reports of raids on five illegal casinos in Sydney in 2024 and a stark increase in private poker games taking place across Sydney – further indicating the threat of the black market.
One of Australia’s largest casino operators, The Star Entertainment Group, is currently facing significant financial difficulty and has cited rising regulatory costs and decreasing player volumes as reasons for its decline. Among the new measures in place, or in the process of being implemented, are mandatory carded play and cashless gaming.
