Inside Money: How terrorism could take down pokies

Photo / Hawkes Bay Today

It seemed like a lot.

"About $20-30,000 gets turned over through these machines every day," the manager of a small provincial town TAB told me once.

Looking up at his security monitor screen I could only see a couple of people in the darkened room, monotonously feeding coins into the noisy, hungry pokies.

"She just won $6,000 yesterday," the TAB man said, and she was putting it all back again the day after.

Pokies really are the most depressing form of gambling. Who are those people sitting there for hours on end?

"Well there's lots of regulars," my TAB contact told me.

He probably knew their names. But under new anti-money laundering proposals currently in an advanced consultation phase, that bloke running the TAB may have to prise a bit more information out of his losers.

According to proposed rules contained in the 'Implementation of the anti-money laundering and countering financing of terrorism Act 2009' consultation document, my man at the TAB may have to demand several forms of ID from his customers in the unlikely event he has to pay them out anything substantial.

The pokie industry argued it would be impossible to do so, however, the government had other ideas.

"We disagree that this activity is low risk," the latest document says. "Activities associated with money laundering vulnerabilities include, for example, refining of currency using note acceptors that accept cash at casino gaming machines.

"Money launderers will feed currency notes into the machine and accumulate credit with very little or no game-play before redeeming the credits at the cashier desk."

If that's what they're doing in the TAB at midday then I feel slightly better for the pokie players - at least they have a purpose.

The anti-money laundering rules, of course, are not primarily addressed at pokie zombies. Over the course of 77-pages the consultation document lays out a range of practices that, once finalised, will result in us all being asked many more annoying questions (and several forms of ID) by financial institutions in the years ahead. As if they don't know enough already.

Those damn terrorists have a lot to answer for.

David Chaplin