A NSW Government inquiry has found billions in “dirty cash” are funnelled into poker machines across the state. 

About $95 billion flows through poker machines in NSW pubs and clubs every year, and the NSW Crime Commission (NCC) says some portion of this money comes from the proceeds of crime. 

Commissioner Michael Barnes says poker machines are one of the last “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 makes eight recommendations to respond to the use of poker machines for money laundering.

It has called for 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.”

While the NCC found the use of poker machines to “clean” the proceeds of crime is not an inefficient way to deal with large sums of cash, and so is unlikely to be widespread, it did find that large sums of money were being gambled by criminals in pubs and clubs, “rewarding and perpetuating” crime.

“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 inquiry also involved the Independent Liquor and Gaming Authority (ILGA), the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission and the financial crime agency AUSTRAC.

ClubsNSW says it will work with the NSW government to implement “practical, proportionate and affordable responses” to the NCC findings, but noted the accusations that clubs were “allowing criminal gangs to launder substantial sums of dirty cash through poker machines … are completely baseless”. 

The Australian Hotels Association of NSW (AHA NSW) said mandatory cashless gaming cards would be “unjustified overreach”.

“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.”