Unauthorised money changers, including ones that loiter in or near Macau’s casino premises, have become increasingly “corporatised and professional” in their activities, with that trend “evident” in the post-Covid-19 period. So said Macau’s Secretary for Security, Wong Sio Chak, in a Tuesday briefing on the city’s first-quarter crime trends.
He didn’t give specifics. The first-quarter gaming crime trend report compiled by Mr Wong’s office, however, highlighted: “The police have also come to notice that, post the Covid 19 pandemic, a small number of illicit money exchange gangs have also started to engage in illicit lending activities.” That was understood to be a reference to loan sharking, known as usury in the Macau legal system.
The city’s top security official stated that the activities of unauthorised money changes had “long been disturbing” the security environment of the city’s casinos and their surroundings. Their activities were often linked to “serious crimes”, particularly fraud, he asserted.
Macau police probed 149 frauds in the first quarter said to be linked to unauthorised money change activity. In 124 cases, the unlicensed traders were allegedly the “crime-doers”, said the first-quarter crime statistics report. Tactics included use of fraudulent bank notes, or promises of money remittance that turned out to be bogus.
The report did not clarify whether the 149 frauds were all or mostly linked to funds for casino gambling. Nonetheless the trend was up relative to the 112 frauds tied to money changing in the first quarter last year, and the 107 such fraud cases in pre-pandemic first quarter 2019.
In the first three months of this year, the Macau police “intercepted” 1,292 unauthorised money changers, and 1,227 of them were subsequently banned from Macau by the local authorities. The police had also liaised with the city’s casino regulator, the Gaming Inspection and Coordination Bureau, to ban 549 people linked to those money exchange activities from entering Macau casinos, the crime report stated.
Macau police had recorded a year-on-year surge in gaming-linked crimes in the first quarter of this year, which the report said coincided with ongoing recovery in inbound-traveller traffic and gaming business. Nonetheless, the first-quarter tally of crimes in Macau classified as gaming-related was lower than the same period in 2019.
The police investigated 351 gaming-linked crimes in the first quarter this year, a 122.2-percent increase from the 158 crimes probed a year ago, the report said. Fraud and usury – accounting for 76 cases and 63 cases respectively – were the biggest contibutors to the tally.
Macau police had investigated 438 gaming-linked crimes in the first quarter of 2019, with the most common form having been usury, which had accounted for a total of 128 cases, or 29.2 percent.
Usury now is mostly by individual criminals, or by groups that are “small” in scale, stated the report, adding that in pre-Covid times usury had mainly been pursued by criminal syndicates. A sequence of “severe” police crackdowns had been a factor in the decline of usury as organised crime, suggested the report.
