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If the funds were sent to casinos, shouldn't the casinos have logs of what the money was used for?

Have you ever been to a casino? You buy chips with cash, then you play with the chips, then you cash the (remaining) chips in for cash. There is no tracking of where each chip came from.

EDIT: Although maybe you're right, if the "gamblers" deposited funds to the casino via wire, direct from the fed, and then exchanged them for chips. So the casinos should presumably have some record of who came to claim that wire in chips.

I'm surprised they haven't started putting RFID tags in every chip so they can track exactly how much each player spends at each game. Combined with proper record keeping, if chips were ever stolen, you could flag them and make sure they can't be redeemed for cash. Maybe in Vegas?

Casino chips have had RFID tags for years.[1][2] The tracking is getting quite good. Casinos can know how much players bet, lost, and won.[3] The casino chip RFID vendors have solved the tag collision problem quite well; casinos can inventory big stacks of chips all at once, obtaining the serial number of each chip.

Chips can be flagged or invalidated by serial number.

[1] http://singularityhub.com/2011/02/12/1-5m-robbery-of-bellagi... [2] http://www.cnbc.com/2014/04/16/cheaters-may-speed-need-for-p... [3] http://www.gpigaming.com/rfid-technology/rfid-in-casino-chip...

Where I live the $5k chips and up are tagged. Or they were, ten years ago when I stopped playing. They may all be tagged now.

Casinos have cameras at the cage, and beyond that cash transactions in a casino have the same reportability as cash transactions everywhere. If it's in the US that means IRS paperwork at $10k. I have no idea what the limits are in the Philippines, but I'll bet they have video of the people who collected the money.

Play craps? You'll cycle chips pretty much all of your chips, and chips you throw to one side get replaced with chips from another side when making field bets -- for example.

Typical player tracking is done through comp cards, where they account for your buy-ins at the table, and buy out at the cashier.

OK, now try doing that with $100MM of chips.

I believe they do that in higher value chips in vegas, http://singularityhub.com/2011/02/12/1-5m-robbery-of-bellagi...

>I'm surprised they haven't started putting RFID tags in every chip so they can track exactly how much each player spends at each game.

and how would casino be laundering money then? :)

The casino doesn't need chips to launder money. That's how other people use the casino to launder money.

>The casino doesn't need chips to launder money.

they do need plausible lack of total control and accounting of all chips' movements.

> There is no tracking of where each chip came from.

Do you have evidence for this? I find it rather plausible that casinos have anti-fraud measures built into their chips to allow tracking of where each chip came from.

EDIT: A quick google shows this is indeed the case for some casinos at least: http://singularityhub.com/2011/02/12/1-5m-robbery-of-bellagi...

Depends on how much cash your throwing around. Casino's tend to track there high rollers with great precision, but if your tossing out < 1,000$ total it's not an issue.

PS: In the US the government requires casino's to track large winnings for the IRS they hand out W9's.

unlikely.

The best way to legally launder money is to use a casino. You bring in your dirty money, exchange it for chips. Then sit on your chips for a week, maybe a month, then go back and cash out your chips for clean money.

Meanwhile, all the cash you moved through the casino is now scattered to some 50-100 different banks as it gets deposited in their daily drops and then transferred as necessary between the banks. In a few weeks, the dirty money is albeit untraceable.

But I don't understand something.

You showed up with lets say $50k at the casino, you departed with the same $50k. If you'll be investigated, you still can't justify the money you walked in with.

Can you claim it as winnings? Do these casinos issue receipts?

Criminal 1 buys $50k in chips using wired funds. Gives chips to criminal accomplices 2, 3 and 4.

CA2, CA3 and CA4 come into the casino a few different times over several months, gamble for while for a net zero gain or loss, and then convert their "winnings" from chips into cash in chunks of $5k or so - flying under the radar.

C1 never needs to come back to the casino where the police might catch him - and he is the only one who is linked to the big heist.

The large value chips have rfid tags in them. You would be investigated. You'd need to play some game with a slight loss to the casino to swap them out.

That part of the story makes the least sense. So casino gets $100M. Then what?

If the casino isn't involved in the scheme, how can a thief take that $100M, using chips or not?

Convert money to chips, cycle chips around, convert chips to cash. It's a really common money laundering technique, though not usually at this scale.

So casino buys chips from itself, gambles with itself, then exchanges the chips to cash where exactly? That makes no sense.

The implication in the article is that the casinos weren't directly involved in the money laundering. Those who were perpetrating it brought the money into the casinos (ie bought chips with "dirty" money), engaged in otherwise legitimate looking behavior at the casinos, and then cashed out the chips for cash. Apparently, the loop on this was tight enough not to fool investigators.

No, the article says the money was wired to the casinos.

The point of money laundering is to conceal the path of funds. Changing your money into chips and then your chips into money (at different times) accomplishes this. Casinos are remarkably light on the documentation side compared to financial institutions. When you change money into chips you don't get a receipt or have to sign anything, you just get chips. Similarly, you don't need to do anything special to switch chips back into cash. If you're trying to make the funds look really legitimate you can even pay tax on your gambling "winnings".

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