Poker machines in NSW pubs and clubs are being used to funnel billions in "dirty cash", a major inquiry into money laundering has found.
About $95 billion flows through poker machines in NSW pubs and clubs every year, but the investigation by the NSW Crime Commission (NCC) found there was little evidence to prove how much is being laundered as the proceeds of crime.
Commissioner Michael Barnes said poker machines were one of the last remaining "safe havens" where cash from organised crime could be "cleaned".
"At the moment serious offenders can enter NSW pubs and clubs, sit down next to patrons in gaming rooms, and openly feed large sums of cash from their crimes into poker machines with no real fear of detection," he said.
"The lack of traceable data collected by EGMs [poker machines] means the exact scale of this criminal activity is impossible to determine but it is clear from our investigations it involves many billions of dollars every year."
The NCC has made eight recommendations to try and combat the use of poker machines for money laundering, including the introduction of mandatory cashless gaming cards and enhanced data collection from gaming machines.
"Clearly if I'm a drug dealer wanting to hide cash, I'm not going to voluntarily participate in a scheme that would enable my cash flow to be identified," Commissioner Barnes said.
"These basic reforms will help exclude vast sums of dirty cash that are primarily the proceeds of drug dealing.
"In drug dealing and in poker machine gambling cash is still king. It's not surprising the two found each other."
In NSW the credit limit or "load up" limit for poker machines is $5,000 for machines in use since 2020.
In older machines the allowable credit limit can be as high as $9,999.
That means it is possible for someone to put $5,000 into a poker machine, place a $5 bet and then redeem $4,995 in what appears to be legitimate winnings.
There is no requirement for a gaming ticket issued by a poker machine to display the amount of money inserted, the amount wagered or the amount lost during play.
Gaming machine tickets are also anonymous, which means someone who has used a poker machine to launder money can use a gaming machine ticket as "proof" their cash winnings are legitimate.
The Project Islington investigation examined two forms of money laundering; the use of poker machines to wash dirty money and hide its origin, and criminals using "dirty" cash to gamble.
Both are serious offences under the NSW Crimes Act and carry significant prison terms.
The NCC found the use of poker machines to "clean" the proceeds of crime is not widespread as it is an inefficient way to deal with large sums of cash.
But it found large sums of money were being gambled by criminals in pubs and clubs, "rewarding and perpetuating" crime.
The report also identified a serious lack of awareness by club boards, hoteliers and their staff of money laundering, which it recommended could be addressed through improved legislation and regulations across the industry.
"It is a deeply concerning peculiarity that in the largely cashless digital economy in which we live that gambling in NSW pubs and clubs remains a $95 billion a year information black hole," Commissioner Barnes said.
The NSW government backed the joint inquiry announced in December 2021.
It also involved the Independent Liquor and Gaming Authority (ILGA), the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission and the financial crime agency AUSTRAC.
ClubsNSW said in a statement it was committed to working with the NSW government to implement "practical, proportionate and affordable responses" to the NCC findings.
"For well over a year, the NSW club industry has been accused of allowing criminal gangs to launder substantial sums of dirty cash through poker machines. Today, the NSW Crime Commission has revealed that those allegations were — and are — completely baseless," ClubsNSW said in a statement.
"The NSW Crime Commission found that using gaming machines to clean large quantities of dirty money is 'high risk and inefficient' and that the practice is not widespread. This is the finding that our not-for-profit member clubs expected."
The Australian Hotels Association of NSW (AHA NSW) said the introduction of mandatory cashless gaming cards would be "unjustified overreach", given the NCC found the use of poker machines to wash money was not widespread.
"We have an industry on its knees post-COVID now being told to introduce an unproven, untested, un-costed and unnecessary cashless system which treats every patron like a criminal," AHA NSW CEO John Whelan said.
"This is the type of misguided, sledgehammer approach which has resulted in past 'policy on the run' failures like the ill-fated greyhound ban and the now infamous lockout laws which crippled Sydney's night-life for years."
The AHA NSW said it would support a lower cash load-up limit on poker machines and both organisations said they were committed to working with law enforcement on the introduction of a statewide exclusion register to ban people with criminal links from gaming venues.
