Greeks have been known to find quite imaginative ways to hide their income from the authorities to avoid paying taxes, or to conceal the illegal source of the money. This time they found a way to do that through the ability given to retail sources to collect cash and then forward it to various online betting companies. To be clear: no involvement of said companies has been uncovered up to this point.
The scheme of laundering money
Everywhere in the world (Greece included) there is a retail network of mini markets, gas stations, convenience stores, and other such enterprises, affiliated with cash collecting for online payment methods like Paysafe or Cash2Code. The regulatory gap in this case has to do with the lack of scrutiny about where this money is coming from and where is it going. In fact, this is exactly their main sales point: send money without oversight.
Greece has quite a strict law about sending funds to gambling establishments that have not received a license from the state. There are 14 approved online betting companies and the findings say that at least 10 of them have been used for this scheme.
These methods work through generating a unique QR code for a deposit to an online betting account. The individuals under investigation, have been using this code to make large cash deposits to the aforementioned retailer, and then, after the account was credited, withdraw the funds to their regular banking accounts, declaring them as profits from successful gambling.
And here comes the IRS
In recent years, the Greek IRS has been using crosschecks through computer software comparing transactions to the records of income reporting. And this is how the scheme was discovered. There were major irregularities and inconsistencies between the amounts given as gambling transactions and the amounts registered to the tax records. They had to do with either no correlation between the justification of the expenses for gambling and the reported income, or the alleged aforementioned profits were either under-reported or not reported at all.
The department of Anti Money Laundering of the Greek Police is handling the investigation under the supervision of former Supreme Court Deputy Prosecutor Mr. Charalambos Vourliots. Among the first things to do was to inform the relevant Gaming Control Supervisory Committee of their findings. Unfortunately, for the gambling world, this will mean that these online payment methods will be banned for Greek customers.
Who is involved in this scheme of laundering money
While no official statements have been released, allegedly there are about 200 individuals that are suspected of carrying out this method of laundering money. The initial findings speak of amounts of up to 1 million Euros for each of them, making the estimated total amount in the vicinity of 100+ million €. Ostensibly, the investigation keeps things under complete secrecy as to the names of those individuals. However, it is impossible to completely prevent leaks. Especially with a scandal of this size.
The first reports speak of the suspects being public officials of senior rank all the way up to ministry directorate positions. If this is true, then we are talking about the modern version of an age-old process of hiding bribing money. A process that has existed for almost 50 years. When someone won a relevant amount, when there were paper tickets or betslips, those who wanted to launder their money, would approach the winner, offer a little something extra to the amount won (usually 10%), received that paper receipt and then used it as their own.
What are the penalties involved
To begin with, all of the persons involved will have to pay a fine of at least 5,000 Euros (depending on the amount of the cash deposits) to the IRS, plus the amount of owed taxes, along with the interest that is relevant to the time that has passed since each transgression. Typically, in Greece, the income from gambling is taxed separately with a percentage from 15 to 35% according to the amount won.
They will all have to provide a satisfactory explanation about where did the money they used to make those cash deposits, came from. If they fail to do so, there will be further repercussions, ranging from steep fines to loss of their governmental position and even incarceration (if the funds are produced by felony offenses – receiving bribes is a felony).
This is not the way to use the services of online betting
Here, at VIP-IBC, we are asking people to open accounts at the best betting platform and enjoy the benefits that come through healthy and legal online betting. We comply with all the rules and anti-money laundering policies and we report any incident that comes to our attention, as per our Terms and Conditions policy. We do not condone any illicit use of our services, or any of the services of the bookmakers that we cooperate with.
