While it’s extremely hard to cheat at a real casino for real money because of all the sophisticated security systems they have as well as the security detail that is trained to spot these sorts of players there are a bunch of people that despite the risks involved with cheating in a casino they took it upon themselves to attempt the scam.
A scam by definition, is a trick that preys on people’s confidence by gaining it and eventually exploiting that confidence which results in fraud or cheating.
Throughout history, there have been attempts like these all around the world, but the ones that are most noteworthy are the following:
- Poker Lenses
In the Les Princes Casino in Cannes, France, back in 2011, a group of four people managed to scam the casino for 64000 Euros by cheating at the poker tables. The scam included recruiting a man that worked in the casino on the poker tables and he used invisible ink to mark the backs of the cards so the people that played the tables could spot the kings and aces by wearing special contact lenses. They were able to walk out the door with a lot of money, but when they returned the next week to win some more, the casino and police became suspicious and they were able to find the marked cards which later on resulted in discovering the scam.
- Beating the Blackjack
One of the most famous ways gamblers are able to cheat in a casino for real money is by counting cards on the blackjack tables. Back in 2011, Phuong Quoc Truong managed to create a whole group of card counters and dealers that helped him cheat in numerous casinos based in California. The dealers that were in on the scam would only mimic the shuffling of the deck of cards. One of the players at the table would use signals and pretend to light up a cigarette while talking to another one of their team into a concealed microphone in his sleeve about the state of the game and when to bet on as well as what to do. They were busted eventually, but they managed to scam over 25 casinos and the sum they took with them is somewhere above 7 million US dollars.
- Ritz Casino Roulette Scam
Back in 2004, three players managed to develop a technology that could successfully predict the part of the wheel where the roulette ball would end up. They called this “sector targeting” and it’s based on calculating the falling descent of the roulette ball, which is moving, pinpointing the most likely landing location. The group was able to get over 1.3 million GBP by using lasers in their cell phones which were linked to small computers in their pocket and once they had the approximate location of where the ball would land, they would bet in a way that would give them the highest chances of winning. The gamblers behind the scam were eventually discovered and caught but they were never convicted because there were no laws of using this kind of technology at the time.
There are a lot of scam stories like this in the casino world, but these are the three most worth mentioning and the ones that really caught our eye. We hope you enjoyed them but also learned a lesson that scamming a casino rarely goes unpunished and unnoticed by the authorities in charge of casino security.
