British Columbia considering cashless casinos to fight money laundering

In world of credit cards and electronic money, the land-based casino has always stood out as a sort of temple of cash. In fact, most land-based gamblers have always had a preference for both purchasing chips, and collecting their winnings in cash. But recently there’s been a push in the town of Delta, British Columbia to make casinos a cash-free environment.
Delta Mayor George Harvie is leading the push towards cashless casinos in an effort to thwart their use by criminal elements bent on using them as a tool for laundering ill-gotten cash.
The mayor’s thoughts on cashless casinos, which are being backed up by Delta’s City Council, are a reaction to comments made by the town’s police in a recent hearing on potential crimes brought on by casinos. (Delta’s casino has not yet been built.) In a memo to the Council, Chief Neil Dubord said that money laundering has been a major problem for B.C. casinos, but that Delta’s force was not necessarily big enough to handle those types of investigations on their own, given their limited size.
Cashless casinos, Dubord reasoned, would remove that element from the casino ecosystem. “Cashless systems require an account that is linked to the individual player whose identity has been verified. This means that gambling data can be tracked and money transactions are transparent, thereby limiting opportunities for crime such as money laundering. Funds can be moved electronically between the account and all gaming devices in the casino,” the Clover Dealer Reporter reported.
Now is definitely a good time for Delta’s elected officials to be considering things like cashless casinos as the town voted in November of 2018 to allow the building of a casino within its city limits.