Forget Macau’s junket launderers, dirty Chinese cash has a new home: Southeast Asia’s casino scam hubs

An anti-corruption crackdown in Asia’s gambling capital has decimated its once-booming junket industry, scattering financial criminals to the winds

They’ve wound up in the shady special economic zones of Cambodia, Laos, and Myanmar – and the loosely regulated casinos of the Philippines and Vietnam

Reading Time:6 minutes

Dirty Chinese money is exiting Macau for money launderers’ new bases of operations in the shady casino-scam hubs of Southeast Asia. Photo: Huy Truong

Published: 9:30am, 27 Apr 2024Updated: 7:39am, 29 Apr 2024

Billions of dollars of illegal Chinese funds are exiting mainland China and passing through Southeast Asia’s online gambling and scam centres, as they rapidly replace Macau’s gaming junkets as the route of choice for financial criminals.

Some of this dirty money has washed up in Singapore, but the city state, which prides itself on its squeaky-clean reputation, is spearheading an international fight against money laundering.

“There was, before 2022, a wave of funds coming out of mainland China in breach of capital-control regulations and some of that was passing through unlawful gambling activities in Southeast Asia and Macau,” said Steve Vickers, CEO of Steve Vickers and Associates, a regional political and corporate risk consultancy.

“The former gambling junkets in Macau have been decimated. In their place, illicit gambling syndicates are resorting to using poorly regulated online gambling activities in Vietnam, and clearing systems in Cambodia and other Southeast Asian countries. The Philippines is huge for illicit online gambling.”

In recent years, Southeast Asia’s casino industry has experienced exponential growth, with more than 340 licensed and unlicensed casinos in operation by early 2022, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) said in a report in January. This followed a series of enforcement actions in Macau, the report explained, which were driven partly by efforts to tackle corruption, money laundering, and illegal capital outflows from mainland China.

Between 2019 and 2023, the new measures resulted in the arrests and convictions of a number of Macau junket tycoons including Alvin Chau and Levo Chan, whom the UNODC report described as two of the world’s largest junket operators.

Chau was arrested in November 2021 and sentenced to 18 years in prison in Macau in January last year. Chan was sentenced to 14 years, later reduced to 13 years, last April.