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| Bet he never thought his smartphone would film this! |
An Eastern European mobster who is the first person convicted of using a smart phone to cheat casinos has been sentenced to 22 months in a Singapore prison for his role in cheating slot machines at the Resorts World Sentosa and Marina Bay Sands casinos last June.
Forty-year-old Radoslav
Skubnik, a Czech national, copped out to several cheating charges in front of a
Singaporean judge, who surely has seen his share of casino and slot cheats
before him. Skubnik admitted that he used his smart phone to get an advantage
on the casinos’ slot machines.
The case was much more
complicated than that of simple casino and slot machine cheating. Skubnik was
part of a criminal gang that preyed upon casinos worldwide. The gang attacked
slot machines throughout Europe, in Macao, and even in the United States, mostly
at tribal casinos whose employees might not have as much slot machine protection experience as their Las Vegas and Atlantic City counterparts.
According to the prosecutor, Skubnik and
two Russian accomplices, forty-year-old Vladislav Logachev and thirty-three-year-old
Andrei Egorov, used smart phones to film the slot machines’ play patterns and
then uploaded the information to a complex server that analyzed and decoded it
before sending it back to the cheating slot players.
With this information, they were able to
gage upcoming large payouts.
Singaporean police reportedly recovered
$125,000 in slot winnings from the guilty parties. The two accomplices,
Logachev and Egorov, have not yet met their fate although they are charged with
similar crimes
It came out in court that the three slot
machine cheats were educated in their art in Russia and then sent all over the
world by mob leaders to raid casinos’ slot machines.
This goes well with
Eastern Europeans’ history of high-tech casino cheating. Back in 2004, in what
was the first well publicized high-tech casino cheating case, a group of Hungarians
and Romanians used lasers to clock roulette wheels in London casinos, although
they were never charged with a crime.
My take: Hooray! Chalk one up for
Singaporean gaming agents, they finally nabbed a high-tech casino cheat team.
But watch out for these Eastern European high-tech cheats…they’re extremely
dangerous to casinos’ coffers!
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