Are Putin's Hackers into Cheating Casinos?

Putin Casino Hacking Center?

Interesting question, isn't it?

We've all heard the accusations against Russian President Vladimir Putin ordering his team of ace hackers to infiltrate the 2016 US presidential election, but as Putin is known to be hoarding billions of dollars in money he's taken in one way or another from Russian businesses and businessmen, is it far-fetched to believe that he's also ordered his hackers to infiltrate gambling casinos?

Nor just US casinos but casinos anywhere in the world.

I don't have a definitive answer for this intriguing question, but I certainly do have an opinion. And it's based on facts that link Russian hackers to casino scams in the past.

Most recently, a team of Russian hackers beat Australian casinos' pokies out of millions. They did this by using smart phones, sophisticated apps and even more sophisticated mathematical minds behind the whole thing.

This same hackers beat American casinos' poker machines out of millions back in 2014. It was noted that American poker machines were paying a lot more money to Russian players than they were taking in--even though there were no large payouts or jackpots.

It was also noted that these Russian players would always have one of their hands in a pocket or in a bag while playing small amounts of money and then seemingly winning every time they made a significantly larger bet.

In Australia they were known to be entering the pokie screen displays into their sophisticated apps.

So, was Putin giving the orders for these illicit poker-machine scams as well?

Well, your guess is as good as mine, but I will tell you this: NEVER put anything beyond Vladimir Putin.

New Bahamian Casino hit by major Roulette Chip-Color Scam

How much is each stack worth?

I am a bit late in reporting this as it happened two months ago in the end of April, but it is a significant piece of news in the casino-cheating world.

Two American casino cheats from Florida hit the new Baha Mar casino with the already infamous roulette chip-color scam, a scam scene quite often in the continental US but not seen before in the Caribbean as far as I know. That's to say I've read no reports about it until now.

The scam is simply to obtain a color of non-redeemable roulette chips at one roulette table and then bring them to a second roulette chip where those chips are put into play where the same color chips at the second table have a higher established value than they did at the first. It is always done with at least two cheats partnering up and in some cases a whole team.

At the Baha Mar in Nassau, one unnamed roulette chips bought in and played at the first table and then handed them off a stack of those chips to a second unnamed roulette cheat who played them at a much higher denomination than for what the first cheat had paid for. Details are sketchy, but according to Bahamian police the pair made off with $6,000 in profits due to the difference in chip denominations.

Their scam came apart when a casino employee noticed the first cheat subtly pocketing roulette chips on several occasions and then heading off to the bathroom, where he must have given them to his cohort.

The $6,000 scam proved to be quite expensive for the pair of Floridian casino cheats. A Bahamian chief magistrate listened to the two tell her that they were pressured from a third man to participate in the scam before she sentenced them to two years in prison each.

My take: Definitely a heavy sentence for a low-level/low tech casino scam. I guess sometimes even the Bahamians are not so mellow!

Is it possible to get on a real enduring Hot Streak playing Slot Machines? Without Cheating?

Sizzling-Hot Slot Machines

When gamblers talk about hot streaks in casinos, online or in brick and mortar ones, the games that often get referred to are baccarat, roulette, blackjack and  poker. I myself as a baccarat dealer recall an evening where a gentleman banker dealt 24 winning bank hands in a row. I also remember one player playing heads up blackjack on a double-deck game who ran through two double decks without losing a single hand.

But what about slot machines?

When people talk about big scores on slot machines the subject is always jackpots or rigging jackpots, which in most casino jurisdictions is a felony punishable by years in prison. You don't hear much about people saying something like, "I went on this big sizzling slot machine streak and didn't lose on a single machine in a week."

Well, maybe that's because such a statement would be impossible based on reality.

But maybe not.

Back in the day when I was cheating casinos, my team and other cheating teams hung out after hours in a Denny's restaurant in Las Vegas next to the old Dunes Hotel. There we would shoot the shit and tell war stories. One guy at another table was telling a story about an old World War One veteran who entered the Golden Nugget casino in Downtown Vegas with a single nickel.

Well, did you ever hear of the expression "His last wooden nickel?"

This old-timer's nickel was not wooden....supposedly it was steel, one of the steel nickels that were minted during World War Two because of shortages of nickel alloy at the US mint.

And that steel nickel turned into gold because the guy went on a Sizzling Hot streak hitting slot machine after slot machine for small jackpots, which led to a much bigger jackpot he hit with five silver dollars at a casino ironically called "The Mint.".

The amount of his sizzling win was more than half a million dollars...and we´re talking 1960s here!

Interesting Online Casino Cheat Article

I came across this article and find it well written and very informative. Is is about Edgeless.io, a compnay that promises absolute transparency and zero house percentage. I don't have an opinion about Edgeless.io, but the article deals quite well with online casino cheating.

Don't Take the 888 Casino Blog and its Star Writer Nicholas Colon too Seriously

888's Star Casino-Cheat Writer

A while back I wrote six articles for the 888 Casino blog. They only published two of them, which kind of pissed me off, even though I was paid for all six. I wondered what the problem was. I mean I have been writing casino articles about cheating and advantage play for more than a decade now, for blogs, magazines and even newspapers, and none of the publishers of my work ever seemed to have a problem with it.

But the editors at the 888 Casino Blog would never give me a straight answer as to why the majority of my articles were never published on its site. So I just let it go, cancelled my agreement with them but still continued to read the articles posted on it.

And slowly I began to see perhaps why they never published my articles. I don't want to sound haughty, but maybe my articles were too good and too real for them.

It seems to me that the bulk of their articles are exaggerated and inaccurate. Their constant coverage of ineffective roulette strategies, baccarat strategies, side-bet strategies to me is annoying.

Then their articles on cheat methods such as dice-control might make readers want to quit their day jobs and become potential Casino Cheats Hall of Fame inductees while in reality their cheating articles are ridiculous.

Take a recent one by Nicholas Colon, one of 888's star writers who has begun posting a barrage of casino advantage-play and cheating articles over the past several months.

The article of his that really got me going to write this critique is his latest casino-cheat article in which he calls Dustin Marks, a well-known and very talented cheat but who in reality did minimum damage to Las Vegas and other jurisdiction casinos, perhaps the greatest cheat of all time.

In his article, Colon states that Marks earned tens of millions of dollars during the four-year period of his blackjack career and as much as $150,000 in single sessions by way of marking cards, stacking cards, stacking chips...and even switching in coolers.

GIMME A BREAK!

If Dustin Marks earned $150,000 per year for each of his four years cheating, I would say he did quite well. Look, I admit that written accounts of how many millions I earned during my 25-year cheat career are greatly exaggerated, but I promise you this: I sure as hell got a lot closer to tens of millions than Dustin Marks did!

Reading Colon's article on Dustin Marx as well as his other articles on 888's blog lead me to the conclusion that he is just another writer on the subject of casino cheating and advantage-play who doesn't know much about either.

Former High-Level Casino Executive Goes Down in Big Pennsylvania Slot Machine/Loyalty Card Scam

Casino Exec/Casino Cheat

Pennsylvania casinos have been a hotbed for casino-cheating scams, and a significant amount of those have involved employees, dealers and floorpeople alike. But we don't see to many high-level casino execs involved in cheating scams.

Robert Pellegrini made the grade. As vice-president of the Mohegan Sun casino in Wilkes-Barre, he engineered and directed a $500,000 scam that involved bilking the casino by using players' stolen loyalty card PIN numbers in order to play the slot machines for free.

Pellegrini teamed up with Rochelle Poszeluznyj, a casino cocktail waitress who memorized players loyalty card PIN numbers as she took their orders and brought the drinks. She then passed that information to Pellegrini, who made copies of the cards and stocked them up with free reward money which was used to get free slot play.

Enter Heltzel, a casino player who'd already been caught cheating at that very but inexplicably was not banned. Pellegrini made Heltzel the player who actually played with the loyalty cards, fraught with stolen identities, and split the money with Pellegrini and Poszeluznyj.

They bilked the casino for nearly a half a million bucks.

How did the scam come apart?

Well, you might have guessed it. Of course it had something to do with Poszeluznyj, who may have been a real looker who liked to go shopping with her share of the proceeds.

Problem was a jealous male dealer who was not involved in the scam but who knew about it from Poszeluznyj, was in love with the cocktail waitress and thought that Joseph Heltzel was bird-dogging Poseluznyj.

Pellegrini got 32 months in prison. At sentencing he claimed he was a compulsive gambler who stole the money not out of greed but rather to support his gambling habit.

Little credibility there, however, as at the time he was arrested he had more than $400,000 in the bank and other assets. He made the statement to the judge, "Where do you think casino workers go on their days off? They go to other casinos."

Apparently the judge bought it.

I don't. I was a casino dealer for two years and most of the dealers I knew stayed as far away from casinos as they could on their days off. Pellegrini was quoted as saying to his cohorts, "Get busy! I have bills to pay."

Poszeluznyj and Heltzel have pleaded guilty in the cheat scam and are awaiting sentencing.

My take: The most unusual piece of this unusual casino-cheat scam has got to be Poszeluznyj's last name! I mean, have you ever seen a last name containing two z's and ending in nyj? Not in this country!

And to torture myself I wrote it out each time in this article! I did not use any quick keys, and of course I could not remember how to spell it even one time!

Pastposting Bust at Mississippi Casino

Mississippi Casino Cheat

Good ol' fashioned pastposting is alive and well, but not always the smartest way to make money in casinos. People trying this casino-cheat tricks, especially those who are far from being professional, should consider other ways to make money, and would probably do better to forget about making money in casinos in the first place.

This latest arrest occurred at the Scarlet Pearl casino in D'iberville, Mississippi. The pastposter, 36-year-old Shantel Monique Welch, was reportedly playing 21+3 blackjack. The amount of her casino-cheat moves and the specific type of pastposting she used has not been released to the public, so I can't say whether she was actually adding chips to already existing winning bets or switching existing chips for those of a greater value. I would tend to lean toward the former,which is more commonly referred to as bet-capping.

In any case, this appears to be the work of an amateur who now stands accused of a felony, surely not worth whatever money she was cheating the casino out of.

7 Years in Prison for Largest Counterfeit Casino-Chip Scam in History

Were all those chips fake?

Of course it happened at the Marina Bay Sands casino in Singapore. The mastermind of the fake-chip-cashing scam was Toh Hock Thiam and the amount of fake chips cashed out in the casino on a single day and night, November 22, 2015, was some $1.3 million.

That is a major scam, even by Singapore casino-scam standards. It is amazing to me how many different casino-cheating operations happen in Singapore casinos, and how many of them involve inside-cheating dealers, though I do not know if Toh  Hock Thiam had any casino-employee cohorts at the tables or at the casino cage.

But what he did have was 16 "runners" to cash out the chips, all of which were $1,000 chips and were of excellent quality. In fact, the counterfeit chips had five of the nine security features that the casino's genuine chips had, and they were not detectable to the naked eye.

A week later, a casino cashier employee noticed a slight defect on one of the chips, which led to the investigation of the scam and the arrests of Thiam and two syndicate underlings he'd hired to distribute the fake chips to the runners inside the casino's bathrooms.

My take: These were the best counterfeit chips since a Las Vegas chip counterfeiter named Charles O'Reilly (called Chipper Charley for his trade) manufactured scores of fake $100 chips in his garage for several Vegas casinos and cashed them all out--by a team of knockout Vegas beauties who moonlighted as showgirls.

Pennsylvania Hollywood Casino Hit by Insider-Dealer Cheat Scam

Sic Bo Scam in Pennsylvania

This time it was on the Sic Bo table, which is frequented by both roulette and craps players. The dealer worked in cahoots with a friend, who received covert siganls from the dealer instructing him when and how much to bet. Then the cheating dealer simply entered the winning numbers on the betting board and his friend collected the payoffs.

According to video surveillance, the pair pulled off the cheat-moves twelve times and earned more than $11,000. Or I should say borrowed since that money will be going back to the casino.

For their efforts, the guilty casino-cheat dealer/partner duo were charged with--you guessed it--12 counts of fraud and a bonus of two counts of conspiracy and one count of theft.

Again, this is another example of repetitive low-level casino-cheat scams that have to end getting caught--even by surveillance staffs that often lack experience.

Card-Switching and Bet-Capping All-In-One-Three-Card-Poker-Scam at Bethlehem Sands Casino in Pennsylvania

Site of Three-Card Poker Scam

A trio of casino cheats hit the Bethlehem Sands Casino with a right-left combination on its three card poker tables to the tune of $2,300, not much if you consider that they pulled a total of 23 cheat moves to gain that sum, all of which are considered felonies.

Bureau of Gaming Enforcement agents ran back surveillance tapes and saw the trio switching cards, glaring at one another's hands and then adding chips to their existing bets or raking chips off what they knew would be losing bets.

This is another example of blatant and repetitive cheating that usually ends the same way. Even casinos with low-level surveillance and cheating expertise get wise when low-level cheats go to the mill not one too many times but perhaps twenty-two too many times!

The cheats were charged with a bucket of felonies and released on $7,500 bail each, about ten times the amount of money they earned for their exploits, which they'll have to forfeit anyway.