Australian court orders The Star to pay A$260 million for AML failures

What happened

On 28 October 2026, Australia’s Federal Court ordered The Star Entertainment Group to pay a penalty of A$260 million for breaching the country’s anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism financing (AML/CTF) laws. The ruling was announced by the Australian Transaction Reports and Analysis Centre (AUSTRAC).

According to AUSTRAC, the Court found that The Star failed to maintain a compliant AML/CTF program and failed to monitor customers to identify, mitigate, and manage money laundering and terrorism financing risks. The failures included not verifying customer information and source of funds, not conducting appropriate due diligence, and not monitoring customer activity. More than 1,200 customers were able to gamble through channels that carried high money laundering and terrorism financing risks.

AUSTRAC says those channels included third-party transactions and cash deposits where the identity of the third party was not recorded. AUSTRAC CEO Brendan Thomas said The Star permitted “a private casino within its casino” to operate without appropriate oversight. He said it kept courting customers who had been excluded from gambling in another state, and allowed junkets ongoing access to its private gaming rooms despite its concerns about them.

Justice Moore said “a significant part of Star’s business was dependent upon turning a blind eye to customers who presented a high ML/TF risk.” He noted that junket revenue alone was over A$1.4 billion, and that revenue from high-risk customers from November 2016 to November 2022 was approximately A$1.33 billion on The Star’s own calculation. The Court said those figures are not a measure of the benefit The Star gained from the contraventions. In setting the penalty, the judge took into account A$200 million in earlier penalties for significantly overlapping conduct, the suspension of The Star’s casino licences, and its supervision by a manager.

Why it matters

The core finding is about traceability. The Court said The Star’s non-compliance “undermined the ability of AUSTRAC and law enforcement agencies to trace money to its source.” Mr Thomas put it more bluntly: because of the monitoring failures, “we cannot know how much money high-risk customers pumped through its casinos.”

The lesson reaches beyond casinos. Any business that lets third parties fund a customer’s account, without recording who they are, has the same gap. The same applies to intermediaries who bring in their own clients, as junkets did, if monitoring stops at the intermediary.

The revenue figures matter for governance. They show how much income sat with the highest-risk customers, which is exactly the information a board needs when it decides how much friction to accept.

Practitioner angle

• Map every channel where a third party can pay in for a customer, including cash, and confirm you record and screen the payer’s identity.
• For high-risk customers, establish source of funds before significant activity begins, and document what evidence you accepted.
• Treat an exclusion or exit by another business or another jurisdiction as a risk indicator that triggers review.
• Where introducers or intermediaries bring in customers, check that monitoring reaches the underlying customer.
• Add revenue from high-risk customers to board risk reporting, so the commercial incentive is visible next to the controls.

Begin with the third-party payment map, because unrecorded payers sit at the centre of this case.