Ontario’s licensed online casinos couldn’t use FINTRAC’s web portal to file any suspicious transaction reports between March 2024 and March 2025 following a hacking incident.
Business and technology publication The Logic reported that the Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada’s portal, which is how Ontario operators submit their reports, was taken down by FINTRAC following a cyberattack in March 2024. The report notes that the portal is mainly used by small businesses; banks and most other large organizations use a secure data feed for filing reports, but iGaming Ontario (iGO) has allegedly not set up that avenue.
Hackers didn’t transfer sensitive data
Consequently, operators were left unable to report suspected money laundering or other suspected fraudulent activity, a state of play that extended for a year until iGO gave operators access again in March 2025 after FINTRAC completed an update of its tech systems and restored access.
FINTRAC stated that the attacker didn’t transfer any sensitive data, per The Logic.
iGO spokesperson Josh Elliott confirmed to the publication that the conduct-and-manage agency is building its own improved and automated system for filing such reports. Canadian Gaming Business reached out to iGO seeking more information, but has not received a response yet.
Authorized online gaming operators in Ontario must file suspicious transaction reports manually and upload them one at a time on a per-incident basis via the FINTRAC portal, although they do have the option to use their own in-house automation technology to speed up the process.
iGO has submitted 80K reports to FINTRAC
Some 49 licensed commercial operators are active in the Ontario market as of May 5 and the largest of them file thousands of reports every year. Elliott said that iGO has submitted more than 80,000 reports to FINTRAC on behalf of operators since April 2022, and the agency and its contracted operator partners are working on clearing the backlog that remains.
Ontario’s 49 operators, who run a combined 84 online gambling platforms, collectively handled almost $83 billion in player activity in the 2024-25 fiscal year alone. That year ran from April 1, 2024, to March 31, 2025; for almost the entirety of that period, they could not file suspicious activity reports via FINTRAC.
Canadian Gaming Association President and CEO Paul Burns told The Logic that the FINTRAC downtime has “been awful for everybody.”
Observers suggest Canadian gambling has a fraud problem
The CGA has made anti-money laundering a core issue of its advocacy. It noted in its 2024 Advocacy Policies that one of its goals for last year was to “actively participate” in the parliamentary review of the Proceeds of Crime (Money Laundering) and Terrorist Financing Act (PCMLTF Act) to ensure Canada’s AML laws and regulations can keep up with the evolution of online gambling.
Last October, a report from TransUnion Canada found that online gambling is the most susceptible sector in the country when it comes to digital fraud attempts, and the rate of instances within Canadian-specific gambling soared 79.3% year-over-year.
TransUnion Canada Head of Identity Management and Fraud Solutions Patrick Boudreau urged businesses including gambling operators to make technology such as identity verification, IP intelligence, device reputation and synthetic identity detection “critical components” of their fraud prevention programs.
In January of this year, FINTRAC publicly warned that known fentanyl traffickers were believed to be using online gambling platforms to launder money from dealing and production, disguising the deposits and withdrawals as wagering winnings.
Under its “general money laundering indicators,” FINTRAC notes that a client making high-volume or frequent purchases from a personal account to online gambling platforms and subsequently receiving funds into the same account from payment processors associated with online gambling platforms is “an unusual pattern” that warrants close attention.