A Philippine lawmaker is calling for the nation’s Anti-Money Laundering Council (AMLC) to be involved in the probe into Philippine Offshore Gaming Operators (POGOs), also saying current laws and thresholds for transactions may need to be improved in order to compete with the use of artificial intelligence.
Joes Chua states that the AMLC involvement could help strengthen cybercrime investigations and monitoring audits, as well as helping the group learn more about offshore and online gaming.
“That knowledge and understanding would be useful in detecting suspicious transactions that could be part of money laundering, large-scale estafa (fraud), scams and other criminal activities,” the lawmaker noted, as cited by the nation’s news agency.
Chua is also suggesting changes to thresholds for banking transactions (currently at PHP500,000 – $8,900) and casino cash transactions (PHP5 million – $89,000), alongside more threshold rules for POGOs and mobile gaming.
“Using a combo of AI and other technologies, scammers and money launderers could be able to easily evade the safeguards and monitoring of banks, e-payment apps, and the AMLC,” stated the lawmaker.
Chua proposes allowing the AMLC to have flexibility to adjust thresholds and set shorter reporting deadlines, saying that he is open to authoring a bill to do so.
