Monday, July 08, 2019

What's the Jurisdiction Got to Do with It?

Electronic Roulette Cheat Yujin Wu in Action
Ask convicted electronic roulette cheat Yujin Wu.

Back in 2016, this high-tech 21 year-old electronics and software whiz-kid began a casino cheating/advantage play spree that could have resulted, in my opinion, in a $100 million dollar illicit profit which would have made Wu the biggest and most financially successful casino cheat of all time. He might have made Phil Ivey's edge-sorting $30 million baccarat scam look like chump change.

All he needed was just a few more years of plying his trade.

But like Ivey blew it by greed, looking to take too much too fast at Crockfords Casino in London, Yujin Wu blew it just the same returning to the same relatively small Charlevoix, Quebec casino a third time after cheating it out of more than fifty grand on electronic roulette during two previous occasions.

Despite Wu's incredible skills and knowledge, he lacked (as lots of geniuses do) basic common or street sense, and didn't know how to protect his cheating enterprise. Simply put, he did not know when enough was enough and should never have gone into that Charlevoix casino the third time after beating them for that fifty grand. The third time he showed up, Charlevoix surveillance, who were already suspicious and waiting for him, were able to watch his movements on the electronic roulette console and realize what he was doing.

What he was doing was combining a metronome and a roulette prediction app that he simply found online, and with the use of two cell phones was able to program a system for predicting with stunning accuracy in which quadrants the ball would land. It was Wu's tapping the cell phones with his finger that led to the discovery.

Wu started out in Australia, then moved on to the UK, then to several other areas including Greece, Turkey and Cyprus, all that while getting ready for his biggest act of all...the US and Las Vegas.

He said verbatim on a video I have of him speaking of his rampage, "It was like printing money!"

Wu had not the slightest problem as he jaunted from place to place, from casino to casino, from electronic roulette table to electronic roulette table.

But then he finally had a scare in Cyprus after a few months of cheating. He won a large amount of money and the casino managers were suspicious. Having no idea what Wu was doing, they asked Wu if they could search him. Wu, naive to the fact he could have simply refused and walked out of the casino, complied. They searched him, found the two cell phones with the apps, but incredibly took it no further and let him go without barring him or anythiing else. Apparently they had no idea what they had been up against.

So Wu continued on, getting real close to the US with a running profit of nearly a million bucks, when he got busted in Quebec.

So, you might be wondering: how do I know Yujin Wu?

Well, the day after he got busted, I read about it online. I was immediately interested in it because I knew how dangerous this was to casinos, more dangerous than anything yet. So I blogged about it. The very next day I get an email out of the blue from guess who...

From Yujin Wu.

He asked if I would take down the blog post as, according to him, it could negatively influence his criminal court case. I refused, telling him that news of his arrest and alleged cheating activities at Casino Charlevoix was already all over the Internet and that my blog, maybe read by a few thousand people at best, was not going to have any effect on his case.

I then heard from Mr. Wu three months later. He was interested in having me testify on his behalf that his method of cheating, known as Visual Ballistics, was not cheating after all.

It turnes out that Mr. Wu was right! In most jurisdictions, including the UK and many other important gambling venues, there are no laws prohibiting people from using devices to gain advantage at casino games while in the US it is a serious felony meriting, in some cases, years of hard prison time.

But the key point was that in Canada the use of any equipment to turn the odds in a player's favor is indeed illegal, thus I could not testify that it wasn't cheating even if I'd wanted to because Canadian law says it's cheating, therefore Mr. Wu was clearly cheating and whatever he got away with in the UK and Cyprus was completely immaterial to Quebec statutes on cheating at gambling.

Mr Wu then told me how this criminal case was going to ruin his entire professional career. Not as a casino cheat but rather the high-level jobs he already had lined up with Google and Microsoft. He said he would never be hired by any of these companies just for having a criminal arrest.

I gave him the best advice I could: Why don't you do what I do? With the knowledge you have you could certainly serve the casino industry well by showing them how to protect themselves and reduce the vulnerability of electronic games and slot machines.

As I was preparing for my open game protection training seminar in Las Vegas in March, 2019, I told Wu to make me a demo of his Visual Ballistics method with all the programs and apps that he could explain while showing us. I told him it would be a great way to introduce him to casinos which might be interested in hiring him down the road for electronic game protection.

Heck, it's exactly what I did! I was a serious casino cheat too, and today I am consulting to casinos in the area of game protection all over the world.

Wu accepted an made a video. I presented it at my Las Vegas seminar on March 7, 2019. Attendees were clearly impressed, and some of the things Wu mentioned were alarming as hell, such as how he could modify the same programs for all electonic casino games and even for live roulette.

However, at the end,Yujin Wu decided he didn't want to get involved in casino game protection consulting. Well, I can honestly say, too bad for casinos. This whiz-kid is the most dangerous person to casinos I have ever encountered or read about it. Let's just hope he puts this behind him and stays out of casinos...and maybe one day decides to get into consulting for casinos.

And now you can see that jurisdiction has everything to do with it!

At least as far as cheating casinos goes.