Chile raids clandestine casinos tied to Chinese criminal network in Valparaíso and Santiago regions

Chile’s PDI, working with the Fiscalía, carried out “Muralla Oriental II” and dismantled a Chinese-origin criminal organization allegedly running clandestine casinos, laundering cash, and moving funds through informal channels in Valparaíso and the Santiago Metropolitan Region. For PSPs and acquiring teams, the useful detail is not the headline arrests — it is the mix of cash-intensive gambling, asset movement, and hawala-style transfers that the authorities say sat behind the network.

1. The operation targeted a criminal organization identified by investigators as the Chinese “Hong Men” mafia. Police said the group was linked to criminal association, money laundering, smuggling, weapons law violations, and the operation of clandestine casinos.
2. Authorities detained 37 people, including 31 foreign nationals. Two Chinese citizens were among those arrested even though they already had active expulsion orders. Another 116 people were notified and will be reported to the Public Ministry.
3. Investigators said the group used several properties as clandestine casinos to introduce and move illicit funds inside Chile’s financial system. In some properties in the Valparaíso Region, police found armored doors and reinforced security systems designed to slow or block police entry.
4. The operation also led to the recovery of assets valued at approximately 1.800 million pesos chilenos, along with other items deemed relevant to the investigation. Authorities additionally identified “safe houses” where large amounts of cash were stored before being laundered and sent to China.
5. According to the investigation, the network used hawala, the informal money-transfer system, to move funds abroad without using traditional financial channels. Chilean authorities had already identified this method in December 2025 during a separate series of raids linked to similar money-laundering and illegal-financing activity.

For high-risk payment providers, this is the usual pattern in a harder-to-ignore form: cash-heavy gambling venues, cross-border value transfer, and an attempt to layer funds before they hit the banking system. When regulators start tracing those flows, the question for PSPs is not whether the casino looked local enough on paper, but what actually moved through it.