Casino-Cheating Scams keep Piling up in Macau

Lots of Cheating in Macau

The biggest one lately of course was the employee theft of $6 million from the Wynn Macau. The dealer who stole the chips from the VIP room inside the casino has admitted his crime but has not told authorities where the thieved chips are.

But this scam is not the only major one in Macau lately.

In an unnamed Macau casino a husband-and-wife cheat-team beat a baccarat game for $50,000. She was the dealer and he was the fake high roller. The scam was simple enough: She just gave him more money in chips each time he exchanged cash for chips. She also overpaid his winning bets. Their scam started at the end of last December and was busted last week after a month. It is not clear how many times the pair worked the baccarat table.

There have also been reports of collusion overpaying scams at roulette. Here the dealers stick big denomination chips into roulette stacks they push across the layout to their cohorts who have placed winning bets. $1,000 chips hidden at the bottom of a roulette stack of $5 chips seem to go unnoticed in certain casinos in Macau.

Add to this all the "dead chip" scams and hustles in the VIP room and Macau can certainly be called the Wild Wild East of casino cheating.

My take: Much like the casinos in Singapore, the dealer-insider cheating-scams are quite banal but surprisingly suck out a lot of money before the casinos catch on to them.