FATF issues new AML risk indicators for iGaming transactions after global review of online and illegal gambling

The Financial Action Task Force has put regulators on notice: online and unlicensed gambling are creating new money laundering, terrorist financing, and proliferation financing risks, especially where payments are fast, cross-border, and anonymous. For PSPs, the useful part is not the warning label — it’s the new set of indicators FATF expects the market to start spotting.

1. The FATF says the growth of the gambling sector’s market size globally has opened new avenues for criminal abuse, with online platforms and payment methods enabling rapid, anonymous transactions across borders. That combination is the core payments risk: money can move quickly, and the trail can get messy just as quickly.
2. The new risk indicators include multiple accounts and payment methods under different identities, discrepancies between customer and payment information, suspicious identity documents, questionable ownership structures, and links between gambling operators or beneficial owners and cyber-enabled fraud or organised crime. In practice, that is a checklist for PSP monitoring teams and acquiring risk analysts, not just regulators.
3. FATF also flagged suspicious betting and transaction patterns, including “smurfing” — multiple small transactions designed to avoid detection — and unusually large or co-ordinated bets on events flagged for possible competition manipulation. For payment providers, those patterns matter because they often show up before the case is obvious in traditional AML screening.
4. The indicators come from FATF’s first detailed examination of risks linked to online and illegal gambling, based on input from more than 80 jurisdictions and a range of industry bodies and researchers over the course of a year. The review covered financial crime risks across casinos, gambling activities, and video gaming.
5. FATF identified illegal gambling as one of the sector’s most significant threats and urged governments to strengthen oversight. That matters for PSPs and acquirers because tighter supervisory expectations usually end up at the payment layer first: onboarding, transaction monitoring, source-of-funds checks, and beneficial ownership review.

For high-risk payment operators, the headline is simple: if a gambling merchant’s flow is built around multiple identities, fragmented funding sources, unusual bet sizes, or opaque ownership, FATF has now given regulators a vocabulary for treating that as a red flag rather than a curiosity.