FATF publishes new money laundering risk indicators for gambling

The Financial Action Task Force (FATF) has issued a new set of markers for the gambling industry, regulators, and authorities to help identify money laundering, terrorist financing, and financing of weapons of mass destruction. For PSPs and acquirers, the useful part is not the headline risk category; it is the list of behaviors that can be turned into rules, alerts, and source-of-funds checks.

1. FATF says all traditional gambling verticals, except lotteries and scratch cards, carry high money laundering risk. In gaming, the organization says terrorist financing is seen more often. For iGaming, the new indicators include identity concealment through repeated VPN use, device switching, and a stated residence that does not match geolocation; multiple accounts under one name or fake names; profile data that does not match the cardholder or bank account holder; several players using the same IP address at the same time; refusal to verify identity by video call; and extremist symbols on an account.
2. For betting, FATF lists a separate set of red flags: sudden changes in betting style or stake size without an obvious reason; coordinated betting, including hedging across all outcomes or deliberate losses to a specific player in P2P games; splitting deposits into small amounts to stay below mandatory identification thresholds; using low-risk bets only to legitimize later withdrawals; large deposits followed by near-immediate withdrawals with little or no play; automated or robotic betting; bets placed by people connected to the sport, such as referees, coaches, or players; and abnormal winning streaks that point to collusion or inside information.
3. The practical takeaway for payment teams is that FATF is not describing one-off fraud patterns, but transaction and account behavior that can be chained together. A single signal may be noise; several signals in the same account, payment method, or device cluster start looking like a case for escalation.
4. FATF also notes the jurisdictional history of this risk area: the Philippines, Malta, and Gibraltar have at different times appeared on the FATF grey list because of elevated money laundering risk. For operators and PSPs, that is a reminder that gambling-related controls are watched not just at the merchant level, but at the country and licensing level too.