Macau Business Magazine Article on Richard Marcus' Cheating Career!

I was recently interviewed by Macau Business Magazine, one of the most important financial and casino industry magazines in Asia. The topic of the feature article is the widespread cheating that is going on in Macau, which you might know has become the biggest legalized casino-gambling area in the world, surpassing even Las Vegas. A large part of the article covers my cheating career. In all, it is a very well-written and informative piece. Read it here.

More Heavy Evidence In Absolute Poker Online Cheating Scandal!

It's been more than two years since the giant online poker cheat scams surfaced at Absolute Poker and UltimateBet, but new evidence keep coming in! Haley Hintze, a former reporter/writer for pokernews.com who covered the scandals, has recently blogged that Scott Tom, Absolute Poker co-founder, was more than just a small cog within the "ferris wheel" online poker cheat scam. She says he was directly involved in using superuser accounts on Absolute Poker.

Here is what she said.

My Take: Shit, I knew Tom was up to his eyeballs in it, and probably so did you, but nevertheless, Hintze has done a good job laying out the dirt.

US Casinos More Worried About Cheating On Player Loyalty Cards Than At The Tables and Slots!

More and more high-tech casino cheats are getting into the art of cheating the Player Loyalty Cards that casinos use to suck money out of gamblers by offering time-incentives for their action, based both on the amount of their bets and their accumulated time spent gambling. The most common rewards coming off these loyalty cards are free rooms and meals (forget it, guys, no hookers on the house! LOL). The high-tech cheats, often dealers and other people working inside the casino, manipulate the information contained on the loyalty cards to obtain rewards that their cohort players can sell to people looking for discounts on rooms and meals. For instance, a person buying chips at a table or using his players´ card at slot machines for $1,000 can get rewards for a player buying in for $10,000--if someone enters that false information into the player loyalty card data base. Their average bet and time playing can also be falsely entered. All this leads to more points and more rewards, which eventually turn into cash that the casino loses.

Casinos in the US are fighting this casino cheat scam by creating algorithms that identify fraudulent playing activity. One way of spotting this is when that activity deviates significantly from normal play. They can then compare players visual play taken from surveillance video and compare it with the information entered into the player loyalty card data base. If it doesn't jibe, then they know someone's been whacking the system.

Some casinos are using an information systems consulting company called Synectics to help integrate multiple systems into one big automated red-flag operative.

“One of the fundamentals is that there are too many cameras and too many dispersed systems and it’s difficult to sift through all that benign data to find out what’s worth looking at,” John Katnic, chief operating officer and vice president of Synectics has said. “This is a means of dealing with escalating security data and what to look at and the way to look at it and what’s outside the trend.”

My take: well, I don't really give a crap about casinos catching player-loyalty-card cheats. In fact, better they focus their attention on them than on guys looking to cheat casinos the old-fashioned way--on the tables!

Casino and Poker Cheating Alert!

Poker and Casino Cheats: Get your asses to Singapore! But don't get caught!

Today, April 27, Singapore's second giant casino opened. It's the Sands Marina Bay Casino, and like the first giant casino that opened in Singapore, Sentosa's Resort World Casino, it will be extremely ripe for those heapin' cheatin' pickin's. The Resort World Casino has been getting the shit kicked out of it by professional cheat teams that have descended on it from all over the world. Only one of these teams has been busted to date, due to a foolishness that really surprised me. That particular French/Spanish team was guilty of continuing to work the casino when they knew they had heat from payoffs on previous cheat moves.

Like its sister casino, the Sands Marina Bay is completely staffed with inexperienced people and with a surveillance department that will be relying completely on its video cameras. No one up in the eye-in-the-sky has a clue to spot moves on their own, which means that the good cheat teams will just beat them up on the casino floor and the eye will never be called into play, except when the amateur cheats do their stupid rank moves and the rats snitch them out.

How long will these two casino candy stores stay sweet for cheats? At least a year...enjoy it while you can!