The Nevada Gaming Control Board is investigating allegations that Strip casino giant Las Vegas Sands used shills to mask bets by Chinese high rollers.
Reuters reports say the issue surfaced when Clark County prosecutors brought charges last year against two women accused of failing to repay millions of dollars in gambling debts to the company’s Venetian and Palazzo casinos.
The allegations come from two former federal attorneys representing the women, whom they say were a couple of local housekeepers recruited with the cooperation of Sands personnel to take out millions of dollars in markers in their own names. The women would then sit near the real players and allow them to use the chips to gamble millions of dollars without a paper trail.
A Sands spokesman has denied the claim, but after the women’s attorneys raised it the county dropped the charges during preliminary hearings earlier this year in Las Vegas Justice Court.
At issue for the Gaming Control Board is whether the use of fronts violates the state’s bookkeeping regulations and broad “decency” requirements, a person with knowledge of the investigation told Reuters.
Casinos have found themselves in an unwelcome spotlight in recent years in the wake of the war on terrorism, which has armed the federal government with stricter, more comprehensive laws to combat money laundering. This has coincided with the gaming industry’s increasing dependence on large cash infusions from wealthy foreign gamblers, most of them from China. The last several years has seen the industry aggressively targeted by the U.S. Justice Department and the U.S. Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network and slammed with hefty fines for violations of federal requirements for tracking and reporting movements of cash.
LVS, in one of the most publicized cases, paid $47 million in 2013 to settle a Justice Department investigation in connection with the gambling activities of an alleged Chinese–Mexican drug trafficker who had funneled huge sums through The Venetian.
Referring to the Gaming Control Board probe, a Sands spokesman acknowledged that regulators have “made inquiries” and said, “We’ve responded in a timely and transparent matter, as we always do”.
