The Macau gaming sector filed an aggregate of 3,837 suspicious transaction reports (STRs) in 2024, the most for a 12-month period since record-keeping by the Macau’s Financial Intelligence Office began in 2006.
The data was published in the latest update from the Financial Intelligence Office, a unit of Macau’s Unitary Police Service.
The full-year 2024 gaming sector STRs represented an 11.8-percent increase from the 3,431 STRs filed in 2023.
GGRAsia has approached the Financial Intelligence Office for comment on the trends of the STRs filed by the city’s gaming sector last year. We did not receive a reply by the time the story went online.
The office had stated to GGRAsia previously that the most common triggers for STRs issued by the gaming sector in 2023 “involved different types of gaming activities, such as conversion of chips without or with minimal gaming activities, conversion of chips on behalf of third parties, [and] exchange of currency/cash conversion”.
The STRs filed by the Macau gaming sector in full-year 2024 accounted for 73.2 percent of the 5,245 such reports. The aggregate tally grew by 13.7 percent year-on-year, according to the update.
“The change was mainly due to the increase in the number of STRs reported by the financial sector,” stated the office. The number of STRs filed by financial institutions rose by 23.7 percent year-on-year.
