Tuesday, September 28, 2010

Stupidity of Cambodian Casino Allows it to Fall Victim to $1.4 Million Baccarat Scam...Using Automatic Shuffle Machine to Boot!

I have heard of stupid casinos before, and taken advantage of many in my day, but the NagaWorld casino in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, takes the cake!

The casino uses automatic card shufflers on its baccarat tables but then permits the dealers to manually shuffle after the cards have already been automatically shuffled. What's the point to the automatic shuffler? you, as well as I, are asking yourselves. Well, the NagaWorld (what the hell does NagaWorld mean anyway?) casino says that the manual shuffle is done as a courtesy to high-rolling baccarat players who want to be sure the automatic card-shuffle machine is not cheating them...LOL!

Come on, gimme a break! Like these high rollers are gonna walk outta the casino if the manual shuffle were refused them.

Here's how the gang of baccarat cheats did it:

Using three women dealers and a tiny digital camera, a pair of Malaysian men recorded the manual shuffle then relayed the order-of-card info back to themselves at the table via a high-tech communication center outside the casino, most likely in a vehicle parked in the vicinity.

The casino finally wised up after the continual abnormal win-rates for the group of players and arrested one of the dealers. But the other two and the players at the table got away with the cash and presumably split the country. The captured dealer spilt her guts on her accomplices.

NagaWorld says it will review its policy of permitting their dealers to do the manual shuffle...gee, how smart they are!!! An official at the casino enlightened the casino world with these remarks: "Players will always be looking to find ways to cheat casinos and electronic ways of cheating are harder to detect than most. Casinos increasingly have to rely on monitoring how much players are winning and seeing if it really is plausible. Everyone thinks it’s easy being the house and you always win but this demonstrates that it really isn’t as simple as you’d think."

My take: I think this post says it all!