Macau is beefing up its Crackdowns on Illicit Money Exchanges

One of the biggest gambling hubs in the East Asia region is Macau. This is the city of promise for many mainlander Chinese people. The week of celebrations of the founding of China is always held in Macau, which creates a week in which the city thrives, giving it the name of Golden Week of Macau.

However, even though Macau is this developed and advanced in terms of gambling, it still faces problems than any other country may face when featuring gambling slots, casinos and etc. One of the main problems the city has is illegal money exchanges that take part in the city. Most of the times these crimes affect foreigners or Chinese tourists, who are looking to find a lot better exchange rate than in the banks. Most of the times this is exactly what they are promised and what makes these exchangers so dangerous.

Gambling-related crimes in Macau

Gambling-related crimes have been under control since 2017, where the regulations and the jurisdiction of the police force were significantly beefed up. Gaming type of crimes is now severely punishable, making potential criminals think twice before committing. However, the police have been having field days with illicit money exchanges, trying to crack down as hard as possible, to make them disappear.

The police have been really hard at work for these couple of weeks, visiting quite a lot of casinos and taking some people into custody. the most recent one was just a few days ago this weekend. In this event, a couple of casinos were visited by the police, which ultimately culminated in the taking of 12 people into custody for further investigations about the legitimacy of their identities. It turned out that 2 out of the 12 suspects were involved in illicit money exchanges, reviving the fears of the government of the continuing trend.

The crackdowns from the Judiciary Police

Cotai was next to be hit by the police raids. it has been seeing a number of crackdowns these past several months and this month was no exception. The police were able to search the area but found nothing resembling a criminal act. The head of the police force, Chan Chong In has stated that even though the government has shown concern about the continuing trend of illicit money exchange, he reassures them that no such trend is prevalent within the city.

According to Cahn all of the criminal activities have been showing up less and less, either indicating to the effectiveness of the local police force, or some new tricks that the criminals have started doing. Chan also added that the Judiciary Police and the main Police force of Macau have been collaborating in finding out as many cases of illicit money exchanges as they can. He believes that the continued crackdowns will soon weed out the remaining ones within the city and will discourage any potential criminals to try the same acts. After all of these investigations and arrests, Chan is assuring everybody that Macau will become a much safer and tourist friendly place. Leading us to believe that these crackdowns are not the only things in minds of the government.