A recent and real incident of casino slot cheating!!!

Read this or sleep

The upshot is that the casino was being cheated at slots by some of its employees. Now, that's what I'm talking about ...

Fly me to the moon ...

--Dorothy

It'd be interesting to find out what they did to rig the machines..

Even without reading the article, I'd ask: Is that cheating? I would call it stealing and / or embezzling.

Now that I read it, it's obvious that the people involved, cheated the casino.



All the threads here about casinos cheating, refer to beliefs that the casinos rig the machines to cheat the customer. There is no evidence of that here.

This isn't relevant to anything that's been discussed elsewhere on these threads; obviously, employees steal from their employers all the time, and not just in the "gaming" industry.

I used to play at Sho-Ko-Wah back when they were a small inflatacasino. They had 10-6-4 JOB with a $1200 royal (almost 101%), and you got the 960-1 royal payoff even if you played one coin! Nothing like an Injun VP machine. Several nearby casinos at Clear Lake had 20-8 Joker, which was 102%. I beat the hell out of those games.

Hey mkl are there any more good VP machines in N California? Want to go hit up them sometime?

Yet more evidence of the dubious integrity of these places.

When I was a member of the corporate world, I used to teach classes on detecting employee theft. I used to tell managers that if they were ever going to steal money from their employer, they should steal a LOT of money, and take off. The crime is the same whether it's $10,000 or $10,000,000, so you might as well steal the $10,000,000 if you're going to do it. The problem is, employee theft usually involves small amounts of money, done repeatedly, over a large period of time. The most common example is someone who takes $20 a week or so out of a cash register, or even $20 a day. That amount of money doesn't do much good, so the person has to repeatedly do it to get any real amount of money. The problem is that, in doing something repeatedly, they set up a pattern of behavior, and, eventually, any pattern like that gets discovered. The other thing I would tell people is to never get others involved. The more people that are involved, the more chances that you have of somebody saying the wrong thing to the wrong person.

The article states that the main perpetrator was charged with embezzling $102k, over a period of 19 months. That's a little over $5k a month. It's not clear from the article if that amount was the amount stolen by all 7 people, or just for that one person. If it's for all 7, then it's like $750 a month for each person.

Setting themselves up to do things repeatedly and establishing a pattern is what got them caught. But, more than likely, after the first time, they got sucked in to the "easiness" of committing the crime, and kept going for it. Why or how the additional people got involved isn't known, but that was a mistake as well.

Quote: konceptum

... employee theft usually involves small amounts of money, done repeatedly, over a large period of time. The most common example is someone who takes $20 a week or so out of a cash register, or even $20 a day...

I've noticed that people of different classes, measured by the kind of wealth they are used to, are tempted by different amounts of money. That's obvious, but often overlooked when making derogatory judgments about lower classes. A guy from a poor background might foolishly steal $100, it looks like a lot of money to him. The Madoffs of this world have the same corrupt instincts, but are only tempted when it involves millions. And they are the ones in position to really hurt people.

Alot of clever stuff goes on in these small casinos with no histories and few people who know what is going on. Those Indians are often getting ripped off by other tribal members with many of the tribes really being clubs run by a few with crumbs given out to the many. I think it may have been in the Carolinas somepleace but a politician was paid off thru slot machine jackpots which probably means some rigging had to be going on.

$102,000 over 3 years? How much did that affect their daily lives? Maybe they were working under the radar, paying out jackpots of less than $1,200. Maybe they knew that some jackpots would not require management sign-offs. "Manipulating jackpot slot machines to cheat the casino" was the crime.

But I agree with Konceptum. If you are going to embezzle or steal, do it big, do it once, and get out of town. Otherwise, you will get caught. And if you do get caught, you should have enough money to take off to a country or place where the feds can't bring you back or can't find you... so you need to get yourself setup for life. In any case, the odds of you getting caught are far less when you do it once for an amount of money that's unnoticeable. If you start creating a pattern, you will very likely make a mistake and get noticed (not that I have any experience in doing this).

Much of my work is redesigning business processes and trying to prevent fraud, or at least complying to the Sarbanes-Oxley regulations (thank you, Enron). People joke with me when I am creating/designing customer checks to "make it out to them and add a few zeros". I usually tell them that if I was going to do that, I would find out the company's bank balance, write them a check for the entire amount, and then advise them to skip town.