Kingston, Jamaica — Jamaica’s fight against dirty money got a jolt of legal muscle in 2024. By December 31, a record-breaking 1,018 attorneys had enrolled on the goAML reporting portal — more than quadruple 2023’s tally. The Planning Institute of Jamaica’s freshly released Economic and Social Survey Jamaica 2024 credits the leap to a full-court press by the Financial Investigations Division (FID), the General Legal Council, and the Financial Intelligence Unit.
The FID’s mandate is clear: squeeze criminal proceeds under the Financial Investigations Division Act, Proceeds of Crime Act, Terrorism Prevention Act, and the UN Security Council Resolutions Implementation Act. That mandate is translating into numbers:
- 1,696 total organisations — banks, casinos, cambios, law firms, and more — were live on goAML at year-end, up 118 percent in twelve months.
- 112,412 suspicious-activity and threshold reports flowed into FID’s databases in 2024, a step-change from 101,715 in 2023 and 89,760 in 2022.
To cement its momentum, the FID’s Asset Recovery Branch pushed out a comprehensive procedural manual and SOPs (everything except crypto for now) on May 31. Those rules of engagement are already paying dividends: the agency disposed of forfeited assets to the tune of J$21.7 million, proving that crime still doesn’t pay — at least not for long.
Taken together, the rapid onboarding of lawyers, the surge in reporting entities, and a newly weaponised asset-recovery playbook signal a tougher, faster Jamaican AML regime. For would-be launderers, the message is unmistakable: the net is tightening.
