Angola’s Institute of Gaming Supervision classified nine gaming companies as high risk for money laundering in its 2025 sectoral assessment, up from four a year earlier. The 125% increase reflected weaknesses in operators’ compliance controls and risk management, rather than findings that the companies had committed money-laundering offences.
The assessment formally rated 17 companies: three as critical risk, nine as high risk and five as medium risk. It covered 25 entities, of which 20 were active during the reporting period; five inactive entities were exempt from classification.
Three active operators did not submit the required documents. The regulator treated them, identified as Entities R, S and T, as high risk by default pending inspection and reassessment, but did not include them in the formal classifications.
Expansão reported the findings and said the regulator regarded the apparent decline in omitted self-assessments, from 14 to three, as a “false improvement.” The ISJ concluded that shortcomings had shifted from outright non-submission towards material compliance failures, including defective questionnaires, contradictory information and missing suspicious-transaction reports to the Financial Intelligence Unit.
The review found that most operators lacked systems to screen politically exposed persons against relevant databases, despite a legal requirement to do so. It also identified weaknesses in customer identification, operators’ own risk assessments, internal controls, compliance officers’ independence and manual transaction-monitoring systems.
The assessment cited individual cases illustrating those gaps. One operator recorded 732 refused transactions without filing a suspicious-transaction report, while three players bought Kz15 million, about US$16,400, in gaming chips and sought a full refund less than an hour later without providing identification. Suspicious-transaction reports flag activity for examination; they do not establish that money laundering occurred.
All three gaming segments were rated high risk. Games of chance and social games each received a vulnerability score of 0.750, while online gaming scored 0.734. The average across the 17 assessed companies was 0.741 on a zero-to-one scale, above the 0.7 threshold for a high-risk rating.
The ISJ linked the exposure to cash-intensive land-based operations and social gaming, digital customer onboarding, and online systems hosted outside Angola. The regulator also reported difficulties gaining access to information held on foreign servers.
Suspicious-transaction reporting nevertheless rose sharply. The sector filed 246 reports across three reporting periods, compared with one in 2024. Land-based casinos filed 138 and online casinos 108, with the regulator attributing part of the increase to its guidance, training and inspection work; the 23 reports recorded from December 2025 through March 2026 covered only a partial period.
The ISJ recommended administrative proceedings against companies that did not provide required information or repeatedly breached compliance obligations. It proposed inspections within 30 days for critical-risk operators, with quarterly monitoring thereafter, and inspections within 90 days for high-risk companies, which would also report every six months. Medium-risk operators would face annual off-site reviews.
The regulator also recommended that compliance officers be embedded in companies’ internal structures and not simultaneously carry operational, management or internal-audit duties. The assessment was approved by the ISJ director-general on Aug. 31.
The findings sit within Angola’s wider 2025 National Risk Assessment, which rated the country’s overall money-laundering risk as medium-high and placed gaming sixth among sectors by mitigation priority. The national review recommended stronger sectoral assessments, better information-sharing and additional human and technological resources.
