As billions of dollars pour into Asia’s gleaming casinos, they are becoming the front line of a sometimes hugely lucrative battle between cheats and the house, experts say.
Both sides look to employ the latest, most advanced technology, but security consultant Sal Piacente says a scam in the Philippines last year took the gaming security world by surprise.
An Asian syndicate used an improvised camera hidden up a member’s sleeve to film the sequence of cards in a deck as it was cut on a baccarat table in Paranaque City in May last year.
Photo: AFP
The order of the cards was relayed digitally to another gang member who, after analyzing the footage in slow-motion, returned to the table as the deck finally came into play hours later.
Piacente, a 47-year-old from Brooklyn, said the multimillion-dollar “cutter scam” showed that as long as Asian casinos were the most lucrative in the world, they would attract the most skillful cheats.
“The scams that happen here [in Asia] are a lot more sophisticated than in the States,” he said at the Global Gaming Expo Asia in Macau, which generates five times the annual gambling revenue of Las Vegas.
“What was happening here in Macau five years ago, is happening in the States now,” he said.
Asia is in the midst of a casino building boom, fueled by wealthy VIP gamblers from China, with billions of dollars being invested in huge integrated casino resorts from Macau to Manila Bay and Singapore.
The new properties bristle with cutting-edge surveillance technology, but the cheats are coming up with their own high-tech innovations, such as the sleeve-camera used in the Philippines.
“If you go to a place like this in Macau, where the surveillance is a lot better trained, then the cheats have to be more sophisticated,” Piacente said on the expo floor at the glittering Venetian Macau resort.
Most of the exhibitors at Asia’s largest casino expo, which ended on Thursday, showed off the latest slot machines or video gambling innovations, but Piacente’s booth consisted of himself, a baccarat table and a bag of tricks.
Loaded dice, split chips and reflective gold rings are some of the more traditional tools of the cheater’s trade, which Piacente, president of UniverSal Game Protection, demonstrates with a magician’s flare.
He is also a master of sleight of hand — false shuffles, second deals, card palming — and can memorize a deck of cards instantly from sight.
He has worked a lifetime to perfect his skills, but tells his clients in the gaming world that the real cheats will be smarter, faster and better — especially in Asia where so much more money is at stake.
“I sit at home and practice thousands of moves for hundreds of hours. They’re at home practicing one move for thousands of hours. They do that one move better than I could possibly imagine,” he said.
“An amateur practices until he gets it right; a professional practices until he can’t get it wrong,” he said.
It is a constant battle.
Hoffman Ma, deputy chairman of Success Universe Group, which owns the Ponte 16 casino in Macau, said US anti-fraud system manufacturers were tailoring their latest products for Asian casinos.
“We do probably have one of the most advanced systems,” he said. “Technology helps you to be more efficient ... and with the huge traffic [of casino gamblers in Macau] you really need that assistance,” he said.
Nevada casinos, in contrast, were hit hard by the 2008 financial crisis and are struggling to keep up with surveillance technology, experts said.
“I hate to say it’s archaic,” said Douglas Florence, business development director at Canadian security camera company Avigilon, adding that many Las Vegas casinos still relied on grainy video stored on VHS tapes.
“Asia has been digital almost since day one because everything is new,” he said.
Avigilon has partnered with South African company Cheeteye, which offers casinos software that scours data from multiple sources to identify suspicious behavior patterns, such as increases in a certain player’s average wager.
Cheeteye representative Graeme Powell said the company’s revenues had doubled in the past two years as casino managers, particularly “young, tech-savvy” ones, adopted the system.
As for the Paranaque City cutter scam, several suspects have been arrested, while the alleged ringleader, Singaporean lawyer Loo Choon Beng, was reportedly found dead in a Chinese hotel room in August last year.
SPEAKING OUT: After Siranudh Scott’s allegations surfaced, celebrities and public figures took to social media to share their own experiences of sexual misconduct and abuse A high-profile alleged sexual abuse case within a wealthy Thai beer brewing family has prompted a wave of painful accounts from survivors of unconnected abuse in the conservative nation. Siranudh Scott, a member of the billionaire Thai family that founded the ubiquitous Singha beer brand, posted an emotional video this month accusing his elder brother Sunit of repeatedly abusing him when he was a teenager. Sunit, who is in his 30s, later denied the allegations in a video posted online, but Singha parent Boonrawd dismissed him from his executive role with the company on Tuesday last week. “I felt I needed to speak
SEEKING ORDER: Rodrigo Paz said that ‘anyone who wants to destroy the nation will have to deal with this president and the full force of the constitution’ Bolivian President Rodrigo Paz on Wednesday said that the nation was at a “breaking point” after nearly a month of protests that have caused shortages of food, fuel and medicine. Paz, who took office six months ago amid the worst economic crisis there in four decades, is battling a groundswell of fury over his policies. The political capital, La Paz, has been besieged by low-income workers and members of the indigenous majority calling for his resignation. “The country needs order and is reaching breaking point,” the 58-year-old said at a public event in La Paz, renewing his appeal for dialogue. On Tuesday, the Bolivian
A Hong Kong astronaut is to join a Chinese space mission for the first time as part of a three-person crew launching today, as Beijing edges closer to its goal of landing people on the moon. The Tiangong space station — crewed by teams of three astronauts that are typically rotated every six months — is the crown jewel of China’s space program, boosted by billions in state investment in a bid to catch up with the US and Russia. The Shenzhou-23 mission is to blast off at 11:08pm from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwestern China, carrying three astronauts to
UPGRADED ALERT: The risk inside DR Congo is now considered ‘very high,’ while neighboring countries face a ‘high’ threat as the outbreak continues, the WHO said Ebola is spreading faster than responders can track it in eastern Congo, where health workers managed to follow up with barely one in five identified contacts in a single day. Authorities in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DR Congo) reported 83 confirmed infections, 746 suspected cases and 1,603 identified contacts as of Thursday, but health workers were able to follow up on only 342 contacts that day — about 21 percent of the total under monitoring — data released by the DR Congo Ministry of Public Health on Friday showed. The figures suggest the response is falling behind the outbreak itself,
RSS