Australian Woman Sues Crown Casino for Casino Cheating! Well, not Really.

Dolphin Treasure Slot Machine

However, it is a suit that can be interpreted as casino cheating by a casnio.

The woman, Shonica Guy, is suing both Crown Casino and the slot-machine maker Aristocrat Leisure LTD, claiming both the casino and the slot machine in question are misinforming players about their chances of winning. The machine, called Dolphin Treasure, is located at Crown's flagship casino in Melbourne, Australia,

Ms. Guy claims that the advertising around the machine says it has five reels with the same number of characters, but one column had more, which according to the plainfiff lowers the chances of winning, thus giving the player a false expected value of what the rate of return would be on monies bet.

Lawyers for both Crown Casino and Aristocrat Leisure have declined comment.

Whatever the outcome, this is the first known case of a player suing a casino over the design and advertising of any casnio device.

My take: Well,this is another problem among mounting problems concerning the image and integrity of Crown Casino, which is already known for the largest insider cheat scam in history where dishonest employees ripped off baccarat tables for more than $40 million. Recently 18 Crown Casino employees were arrested in China for illegally promoting gambling junkets to their casino.

As far as the suit itself goes, Ms. Guy will not receive any damages, and she is not asking for any. So I imagine that the casino and slot company will correct the advertising and promotion surrounding the Dolphin Treasure slot machine very quickly.

Who Are the New Wave Casino and Poker Cheats?

The Turks.

Yes, it's no longer the Russians and the Chinese. The Turks are scamming casinos worldwide at a startling pace, and these Turkish cheats are good!

Uglier and even better!

Their main casino-cheating ground is Europe, mainly the UK, France and Monaco, where they duped several Monte Carlo casinos out of millions by simple roulette chip-color-up scams. They have also hit UK casinos with many bold roulette scams, including one where they actually grabbed the spinning roulette ball and placed it on their own winning number...with lots of distractions, of course.

Most of these Turkish casino cheats have adopted the UK as their second home and become naturalized citizens. Doing so makes it much easier for them to gain entry to European casinos that require membership in order to enter.

They have also preyed on Singapore's casinos, which is more or less a requirement for any international casino-cheat team.

As far as Turkish casino-cheat and poker-cheat activity in US casinos goes, it is on the rise but not yet as significant as the damage they're doing in European casinos.

The Turk casino cheats are also major players in online poker cheating as well.

Canada's Casino Rama Newest Canadian Casino Hack Victim

Nice place to get your data hacked

It's now happened twice in one year to a Canadian casino. First it was the River Cree Casino earlier in the year. Now Casino Rama.

In both casino-cheat hacking cases, malware was used to gain access through casino advertisements.  The results were that hundreds of casino customer's personal records were exposed, mainly credit cards, pin numbers and passwords, all of which can cost these victims at lot more money and aggravation than what they might experience at the casinos' gaming tables.

The first big fallout from all this is a $50 million class-action lawsuit against Casino Rama. Lawyers for the casino will try to claim immunity since the casino is owned by the Chippewa Frist Nation and not a regular Canadian corporation.

To read the full details of this case, go here.

Talk About Audacious Roulette Cheat Scams!

Place the ball yourself and win!

I have heard about quite a few of these, everything from throwing water at the dealer's face in order to distract for a pastposted bet to trying to tilt the roulette table like an old pinball machine to get the ball to drop in a preferred winning number, but this latest one takes the cake!

How 'bout a roulette cheat going right to the spinning ball and placing it himself on the number he'd bet on. Sounds impossible, right?

Wrong!

Two British casino cheats figured out just how to do it and quickly beat a UK casino for more than fifteen grand in just four spins.

And they almost got away with it. The only problem was that they didn't sufficiently block out the overhead casino cameras that filmed it all.

Read all the details of this entertaining roulette cheat scam here.

And now the Borgata Wants its Monoey Back!

Borgata to sue Ivey

With the decision in the Phil Ivey baccarat edge-sorting trial in from London, Ivey's main US victim, the Atlantic City Borgata, wants its money back!

That would mean about fifteen million bucks plus damages!

The damages, they say, are a quarter million in casino comps, to which one Borgata official said Ivey and his female cheat partner, Cheung Yin Sun, drank bathtub-loads of their most expensive champagne.

They also claim that had Ivey played without the cheat tactic, he would have lost $5.5 million according to probability analysis.

So, we go from one Ivey edge-sorting trial to perhaps another. Read an article about it here.

Poker Champ Phil Ivey loses baccarat-cheating case appeal against Crockfords

Cheat loses appeal

We've all been hearing several accounts about this story since 2014, but now it is finally over. Phil Ivey and his female partner Cheung Yin Sun, who has had prior problems with casinos, used a cheating tactic known as edge-sorting to beat Crockfords for more than $10 million back in 2014. This tactic was taking advantage of defects in the cards which allowed them to partially know the value of the cards before they were turned face-up. Ivey and Sun also manipulated the dealers to change their dealing procedures so they could better determine the cards' values before placing their bets.

The UK casino Crockfords refused to pay Ivey his winnings once they discovered his tactic. Ivey sued and lost back in 2015, and now his appeal has also come up loser, so the case is finally over.

Ivey had this comment about the judge's decision: "The trial judge said that I was not dishonest and the three appeal judges agreed, but somehow the decision has gone against me. Can someone tell me how you can have honest cheating?

The pair also made tens of millions using the same cheat scam in various casinos across the world, most notably the Borgata in Atlantic City.

My take: Come on, Phil, give us a break! What has never come out is exactly how Ivey came to know about these card defects. It is my theory that his foxy little Korean cheat partner, Sun, got the information and passed it along to Ivey, who then used his celebrity to dupe Crockfords and the Borgata into dealing their baccarat game outside of correct and normal procedure, which is a form of altering casino dealing, and that constitues cheating at gambling.

And let's not forget that Ivey had premeditated plans to do exactly what he did.

Bottom line: Phil Ivey is a casino cheat and is even in the Casino Cheats Hall of Fame!

Casino Cheat to World's Best Pickpocket?

Casino Cheat to Pickpocket?

I recently received an email from a reader of this blog who linked me to this very interesting article in the New Yorker magazine. It relates the story of a man, Apollo Robbins, who is considered the world's best pickpocket and his early beginnings as a casino cheat. The blog reader told me that the article reminded him of me, that he noted certain similarities between my life as a casino cheat and Mr. Robbins' as a pickpocket, both of us using advanced psychology.

I found the article quite interesting, though I must concede that the talents of Mr. Robbins' far exceed those of my own. Much more sleight of hand and deceptive tactics are needed to successfully get into people's pockets than into casinos' cages...Well, I'm not so sure about that!

Let me know what you think.

Hotel Room Poker Scandal Takes Place in China

The Marker

A favovite of conspiring poker cheats who do not like risking their asses by cheating inside casinos and public cardrooms is to set up their poker cheat scams and victims inside hotel rooms. This tactic, made infamous by the 2007 Atlantic City Borgota Hotel Room Scam, which implicated ex-anti casino-cheat game protection consultant Steve Forte, has surfaced once again in the Chinese city of Dali.

I do not know if this Dali poker-cheat scam was as artistically drawn up as a tableau by the famous painter of the same name, but it did hook a sucker for around ten grand!

Read the full article here.

My take: Well, setting up a poker scam in a hotel room that is not on a casino property should be a lot less riskier for the poker cheats involved, but these cheats were pretty damn stupid in as much as they hung out in the hotel room after the scam was done, and when the victim reported his suspicions and brought the police to the scene of the scam, they found boxes of marked cards as well as the special contact lenses used to see the markings on the cards.

Nevada Gaming Control Board Enforcement Division Chief Gives the Lowdown on Casino Cheating

NGCB Chief on Cheating

James Taylor, the deputy chief Of the NGCB's Enforcement Division, told a packed seminar room at the Global Gaming Expo in Las Vegas that casino cheating and scams are on the rise and that 25% of Nevada's casino cheats are the casinos' own employees.

He spoke about a wide range of casino-cheat activities, everything from high-tech scams to desperados grabbing players' chips off the tables and running out the doors.

Ironically, he said that these chip grab-and-run scams are the state's biggest casino-cheat headache and are also the hardest to stop and catch the cheats involved.

He said that casino cheats are becoming more sophisticated with high-tech scams like marking cards with invisible ink and reading them with special glasses or contact lenses

He also expressed his sadness that so much casino management was involved in crimes against the casinos they work at.

You can read the complete news article here.

My take: I agree with Mr. Taylor when he says that the basic scams are often the most difficult to stop. After all, my notorious Savannah scam was so easy and basic but the casinos could never figure it out--not even with an FBI investigation!

BrainChip Technology to Further Thwart Casino Cheats?

Brain Chip or Brain Dud?

A high-tech company out of Australia called BrainChip says it has developed a new technology called Game Outcome that will greatly help casinos catch the highest level cheats at the baccarat tables as well as throughout the whole casino. BrainChip says its new technology will also catch dealer errors and make sure that players at the tables receive their fair share of comps based on their betting action.

The technology works by using video streams from standard surveillance cameras that recognizes sequences of played cards, proper dealing techniques in conjunction with winning hands and proper payouts. A spokesman for the company claimed the technology was like having a full time surveillance operator assigned to every gaming table in the casino.

BrainChip says their technology could save casinos up to $50 million per year.

For more on this read the newspaper article.

My take: This sounds to me like another over-hyped method of detecting and stopping cheating at poker and casinos, much the way all that biometrica surveillance stuff supposedly spots casino cheats entering target casinos before they even get their clothes on at home.

Besides, is saving $50 per year in casinos worldwide such a big deal?