Casino Surveillance News

February 2011

Welcome back to Casino Surveillance News, the longest-running trade letter for our little niche in the casino world. I am still working up the section on cheating devices for table games. I keep finding more. I guess I will just have to at some point post it all and then do updates every so often. In the meantime, you might visit the site, and check out the pages listed here We can all learn from these, and of course one of the things we can learn is that the cheaters work harder than anyone in order to create and work a scam. This entire newsletter can be viewed at http://casinosurveillancenews.com/ The news-only portion can be seen at http://casinosurveillancenews.com/newsletter-2

CSN News:

Currently Available Programs: CSN's complete, on-site, one-payment permanent training program, customized for YOUR casino operation, can still be set up for you. We can accommodate privately owned, corporate, or tribally owned casinos outside of Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Please see what is available at this page: http://casinosurveillancenews.com/surveillance-training-programs WE STILL SET THE STANDARDS FOR TRAINING OF CASINO SURVEILLANCE and for BASIC SECURITY TRAINING FOR CASINOS: I have taken down two related websites from the net. ALL OF OUR INFORMATION AND TRAINING IS STILL AVAILABLE either on the base CSN website or directly  from me. Contact jimgoding@casinosurveillancenews.com Keynote Article: There is nothing I can say to introduce this article, except it is the first of two that are essential to training of Surveillance and Security staff, as well as management in the rest of the casino.

Distractions: Part I

By Jim Goding For any person whose duties include detection and examination of potential criminal activity, distraction is a key concept in all its applications and permutations. To put it very bluntly, there are few methods of theft and cheating, internal or external, that do not employ distraction--either as a passive method or an active one--as a part of the scam. The concept is a simple one:

While the target, or its in-place safeguards, is looking there,

the theft or cheating move happens here.

Passive distraction takes advantage of events that are already happening. Active distraction provides an event to take attention away from the actual scam. Both are very important to us in all aspects of our duties in casino surveillance. There are many examples, and there are ways to handle all of them, either with existing technology or with allocation and training of personnel and their duties. We are going to discuss a number of criminal activities common in casinos, with examples. This is not by any means to be considered a complete list: It is only a means of getting you and your management thinking in terms beyond the immediately visible. It should be noted that these examples are taken from actual experience in the casino world; however, they apply to ANY security endeavor, from shopping malls and grocery stores to major events such as concerts, sports, and conventions. Some of them apply especially to any area where tourists are attracted. The concept of distraction applies especially to tourists, simply because they are distracted to begin with, and not really paying attention to their immediate personal environment: They are putting all their attention on something far more interesting, whether it is wider, such as the  Eiffel Tower, the Grand Canyon, or a rock concert, or more narrowly focused, such as a slot machine or gaming table. Either dispersed attention or narrowly focused attention makes it very easy to either take advantage of the situation at hand or create a further diversion which pulls the rest of a person's attention away from the scam. Passive Distractions By passive distractions, we mean those which are already in place. The criminal simply takes advantage of something already happening. The easiest example of this from the casino is the thief who walks up behind the victim and steals a purse, or a wallet from a jacket, which has been slung across or left under or on a chair, while the owner is playing a slot machine or table game. The victim has provided his or her own distraction, and his or her situational awareness is very narrowly focused. Nothing beyond the game or machine is intruding. Often these people are almost hypnotized by the gaming activity. Gaming cheats also use this. One of the most common scams is for teams of gaming cheats to move in on a casino that is just opening, or after a major expansion. The cheats know that there are many gaming staff--including dealers, slots staff, floor supervisors, security and even surveillance--who are barely out of training. Often the dealers and supervisors--not to speak of security and surveillance--have never dealt with a live gaming environment before. They are definitely not yet up to working as a team to safeguard the casino and its patrons. This fact alone provides one of the most major available passive distractions. It provides a window of opportunity for cheating teams. For a period of up to several weeks, the personnel involved are so focused on doing the routine actions of their own positions that they have no attention left for safeguarding the games and the casino and its patrons. After a few weeks, if staff are properly trained, the routine actions become just that, and the staff can then pay attention to more than dealing the cards, making change, correct take-and-pay. The dealers actually are capable of catching people attempting to past-post, press and pinch bets, switch cards, or any of the other common casino scams. They are able to focus their attention outside their own actions. The floor bosses become able to see beyond the fill slip, rating card system, handling immediate player complaints of dealer errors and putting dealers into position. They can start to pick up when dealers are making procedural errors and monetary mistakes, take action to further refine dealer skills and procedures, and especially detect the actions external cheats and internal thieves must take to pull off a scam. This applies just as much to the Gaming Surveillance staff. One casino I worked, early in my gaming career, provided many distractions to its patrons, and it was the target of more thefts from patrons than any other casino I have seen since. Besides the gaming activity itself, the casino provided circus acts (clowns, dancing animals, motorcycles in cages and acrobats), and near the end of the period I worked there, also provided a "party pit" with loud music, visual effects including strobe lights and a colored lightshow, dancing girls and prize drawings. It looked and sounded like a 1980s disco in there, and there was absolutely no chance that a dealer with less than several years experience would be able to even deal his blackjack game. Another casino with which I became familiar had tasked its Surveillance Department with control of access to all secured areas. Though in most casinos this is a part of Security Dispatch duties, this casino had no monitors in its dispatch area and it made complete sense for Surveillance to be able to look at who was being allowed in and out before they passed through access points. Unfortunately Finance had no set-in-stone rules for what could be taken in and out of cage and count rooms, who or how often, with no rules regarding when and if people could move between areas. This made the Surveillance control of the area ineffective, and really nothing more than a distraction. The entrance request alarms, through some parts of the day, went off every few seconds, completely occupying an operator and/or Supervisor, with any other concentration by the operator in charge impossible. Try counting down a shoe in real time on a possible advantage player, or observing suspicious activity on blackjack, craps, roulette or baccarat, with up to three or four times a minute having to check a different screen or monitor for who is going in or out of one of the cages or count rooms and what they might be carrying, before passing them through. Yet another casino had a part of its policy regarding underage people that when a person had been denied entry by the security officers at the multiple casino entrances, they were to be monitored in real time by surveillance until they left property, so that surveillance could warn security if and when they tried to re-enter. This prevented a lot of underage people from coming in through a second entrance, and was a very laudable policy and procedure--especially as that casino faced very serious fines for allowing underage patrons to gamble, or even enter a gaming area. It worked very well, except for the fact that there were, especially on busy nights, often three, four or more people being monitored simultaneously by surveillance, with more coming in all the time over the security radio. Often so many were occurring simultaneously that there was no one left to watch cages, table games or slots. But let's get a little more specific here. What other kinds of passive distractions can be seen--and taken advantage of--by cheats, thieves, and even, at an extreme, robbers, whether the target is the casino or its patrons? When are the casino safeguards stretched to the limits, including supervisors, security and surveillance? How do we remedy the situation? First, any particularly busy time for the casino is prime time for scams. This is especially true when the casino's safeguards are overloaded with routine actions. Take a Friday night, just as an example. While there might be more dealers than really required, what about the staff charged with safeguarding the casino, such as supervisors, Security and Surveillance? Are there enough officers, enough manned monitor stations, to handle the load? Let's add in, just as an exercise, that this hypothetical casino also has Security monitoring entrances and checking people for ID when they might be underage, with Surveillance monitoring those who have been denied entrance. Let's add in that the TITO-redemption and change machines are being monitored because it is a busy Friday and there is a cart full of money being sent out with Security escort to fill the machines for the third time during the evening. There is an emergency drop being performed on several slot banks, which takes a minimum of two officers and one Surveillance operator, because there is a lot of money involved. Fills are being sent out to games every few minutes, with tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in chips being carried from cage to pit by security officers. Every table in the house is full, with people not only standing behind the games waiting for a spot, but people passing in wagers on top of the players already on the table. The slots have people waiting to play, the bars are going full blast and the nightclub is full with people waiting at the door. Every security officer on shift is working hard just to keep up with current activity. Two officers have been stationed next to high-roller players, with hundreds of thousands of dollars in action on two separate tables, to discourage would-be snatch-and-run thieves or other forms of scammers. Suddenly there aren't enough security officers. Then some creep (pardon the technical term) steals a purse from a patron in slots. Surveillance gets involved in trying to identify this person, and Security wants his movements traced so they can find him for the police. Now you get two slip-and-fall incidents, either or both of which could be phony, and either or both of which could result in  lawsuits, and which also have to be monitored in real time until resolved. Someone starts a fight in front of the nightclub. Three calls come in from the pit that they want three separate players on three separate tables monitored, either for possible advantage play or for suspicious activity. Two more calls come in to correct dealer errors on roulette, and the craps pit calls about some jerk (pardon the technical term) trying to past-post the Don't Pass after the point has been established. Evidence has to be gathered and documented for the arrest. Someone else calls about bent cards on a carnival game, and another pit calls about some suspicious activity on Pai Gow Poker. Someone is winning $50,000 at roulette, and the Poker room finds creased cards on one of the games. Another pit boss gets suspicious about a crap dealer who has several times knocked over his working stacks and is not properly clearing his hands. A blackjack dealer is spotted pushing two losing hands, and rather than getting him off the game (there suddenly aren't enough dealers), the pit wants Surveillance to monitor him continuously, because the floor supervisor has six games to cover. It can be an exciting business. Experienced people will note that there are a lot of things being demanded of Surveillance that should in fact be covered by on-site supervisors. But that does not relieve us of our own responsibility of gathering evidence, observing, documenting and reporting. At some point during all this activity, some things have to be dropped or put on automatic for later attention. Technically, they have to be assigned a lower priority in present time. No matter who does it, if it blows up later, the person making that decision is going to have to take an axe. Unless there are policy points allowing them to make that decision. Specifically. Even that takes a minimum of documentation, probably from the Surveillance Supervisor, as to why certain actions have been assigned a lower priority in present time, even though continuing to record activity. Even without this degree of action on a busy holiday-weekend Friday night, Surveillance and Security have often, just with routine activities, both dropped far below the desired level of pro-activity. They are simply reacting to external events or handling the routine actions that keep the casino running, and no-one is actually able to watch for suspicious activity in real time. There aren't enough people--or even enough work stations--to handle the load of routine activities as well as maintain a pro-active profile. This is when you get hit by a cage robbery, a card-counter team with agents on four or five games, a cheat team running a dice-slide scam on craps or a past-post or other scam on roulette. Someone drives up to the motorcycle parking area and a team throws five Harleys on a flatbed and drives away. I have worked in casinos where the above activity level was handled by a solo investigator on graveyard shift, or by two people and a supervisor on Swing shift. I have seen a number of casinos where there were never more than two or three people working in Surveillance, with comparable loads to what I have outlined above. I have also worked for and consulted with casinos where the level of staffing was far higher, yet because of the size of the casino and the amount of activity, it still was insufficient to handle peak-time loads--especially when Surveillance and Security had to be focused, because of casino policy and/or regulatory requirements, on items of lesser priority. I won't put into writing what I would do, with knowledge of staffing levels in Pits, Cage, Slots, Security and Surveillance, if I wanted to run a scam on a casino. You can watch that in the movies--and even these fall far short of reality in many ways. What is important, at this point, is that we understand what we CAN do to relieve the load and retain the effectiveness of both Surveillance and Security. And remember: so far we are only dealing with passive distractions--those that are already in place during the normal levels of activity. Active Distractions Active distractions are those that are created specifically to pull attention away from the real scam that is occurring. This is an essential part of many scams, both gaming cheats and straight theft activities. The simplest example is the pick-pocket: a normal part of this scam is for the pick or an accomplice to bump into the victim, pulling his attention completely away from the location of the wallet or other money. Then the pick pulls the wallet, undetected. On the gaming floor, the rail thief on a craps table waits for the victim to follow the dice with his eyes (passive distraction), then spills a drink and leans across and blocks the view while pulling chips out of the rail. The most common card-switch scam involves one "player" pulling the dealer's attention (talking, acting drunkenly while acting as if capping a bet, or asking advice on handling their cards, etc.) while two people on the opposite side of the table switch cards, building one good hand out of two sets of cards. One person tries very obviously to place late bets on roulette or craps, and the real past-post takes place while that distracts the dealer. Young male craps dealers can be distracted by a lot of cleavage (ask an old-timer pit boss about "short-sticking" sometime), while a past-post occurs at the other end of the table. Or the brother-in-law of the lady with the cleavage is the dealer at the far end of the table, and high-denomination chips are disappearing while the boxman has his eyes stuck elsewhere. One dealer is making "mistakes," like pushing losing hands or locking up winning bets, tying up the attention of both floor supervisor and Surveillance, while on another table the dealer is exposing the hole card or flashing the top card on the deck to a big-money player, or stealing $500 chips out of the rack. One very expensive card-switch scam took the dealer, floor boss and Surveillance out by exposing the breasts of a player on the same table. They just tried it too many times. Think about a player on one game playing maximum wagers, whether winning or losing, but doing nothing crooked, while on another game flat-out cheating is going on at a much lower level. Say, a baccarat game with a limit of $25,000: two players are betting opposite each other at $15-20,000, while on another game the dealer is exposing the top card to a player betting $3000 a hand. Or switching cards. Or filming the sequence during the shuffle or cut. No one is going to hear about the lower level player until he is tens of thousands of dollars ahead. It kind of makes you wonder about the nervous-nelly floor supervisor who, on a busy Saturday night, makes a habit of calling Surveillance about the player wagering $300 a hand on BJxxx or betting black chips outside on roulette. Or asks for full-time Surveillance attention on another game where the supervisor is worried about an inexperienced dealer. Mostly, you can forgive them, for they know not what they do. On the other hand, they might be in on a scam on another table, knowing very, very well that they are pulling Surveillance attention away from real, expensive, illegal cheating. Another scam in a hotel involved a large team. One part staged a fight in one part of the casino, drawing off all Security, while a major theft was performed of a jewelry merchant on the path to the casino exit on the other side of the property. The list of possible distractions is endless. Just remember that almost any intentional scam that can occur in a casino most likely involves a diversion of some kind. The ones that cost you--or your guests--a lot of money are probably done while dealer, supervisor, Security and/or Surveillance are looking in another direction in response to a perceived threat or other diversion, and when they are also loaded up with their routine actions. Solutions So, in a department or casino which is not organized to handle it, even the best of Surveillance systems and staffs, best-manned Security departments and biggest casino enterprises necessarily fall short of the necessary manpower or available attention to be able to see, in real time, everything that is going on all at once and still provide excellent customer service--whether the "customers" involved are the actual guests of the casino, or whether they are other departments being supported, such as Pit and Surveillance teamwork, Security and Surveillance, Cage and Surveillance, Security and Cage, or any other part of the normal and peak-load performance expected. Just like any business or activity in which there are variable loads, though, the solutions fall into several major areas: Staffing and scheduling Assignment  of duties Training of staff and supervisors Priorities assigned according to law and to potential losses or gains Teamwork between departments Protective procedures Technical aids We will discuss these in detail in the next article. Copyright © 2011 by Jim Goding. All rights reserved under US and international copyright law. Publication or distribution without the expressed consent of the author is a violation of copyright law and of the proprietary rights of the author. For a fine look at how properties handle Surveillance/Operations integration in the biggest gaming jurisdiction in the world, see Jesse Silva's article at this link:

It's News Time

Busts and Scams:

In mid-December 2010, a man walked into the Bellagio on the Las Vegas strip, brandished a gun and walked out with over a million dollars in gaming chips--which he was then unable to cash out, due to casino safeguards. Recently, Las Vegas Metro arrested a man accused of this crime, the son of a Las Vegas Judge. See the story A tourist from Minnesota has filed a multimillion-dollar lawsuit against the Hard Rock Hotel in Las Vegas charging defamation, false imprisonment and assault over an Oct. 12 incident with hotel security. See the story For a little humor in your life, check this one out: A tourist says he was traumatized when Las Vegas police threatened to arrest him after he complained about an act of prostitution in his hotel room. Despite his own alleged act of soliciting prostitution, which he admitted to Metro police, he feels he was victimized by the "out-call dancer" sent to his room by an escort service in Las Vegas. See the story (Editorial note: he's lucky Metro didn't just shoot him and put him out of his misery.) New Jersey casino regulators handed out $115,000 in fines to Atlantic City casinos for failure to immediately catch a cheating dealer and customer, malfunctioning alarm system allowing a robber to walk, allowing someone other than the winner to fill out tax forms for slots jackpots, and underage patrons gambling and drinking. See the story Caesars Palace is suing a Beverly Hills, charging he fraudulently ran up $500,000 in unpaid gambling debts before filing for bankruptcy. See the story A Connecticut man who recently won a $45,000 piece of a jackpot at the Turning Stone Casino is being sued, because officials say he won the money fraudulently. See the story Connecticut state police say four people working together cheated Foxwoods Resort Casino of nearly $900,000 by hiding cards up their sleeves. See the story The Mississippi Supreme Court has deemed a casino that continued to serve alcohol to a man on a 16-hour gambling and drinking bender, and who later drove and killed two people, is liable for the deaths. See the story A casino dealer who cheated at cards as a private individual and was fired from his job has lost his claim for wrongful dismissal. See the story The British Columbian government says it is prepared to tighten regulations to prevent exploitation of casinos by organized crime. See the story A related story: Security staff at two B.C. casinos intercepted four attempted transfers of gaming chips worth $1.6 million during a period of suspected money laundering at gambling establishments in the province. See the story Two blackjack dealers at California's Tachi Palace Casino were arrested for stealing $500 poker chips.  Casino security became suspicious when they noticed the two dealers frequently looking around to see where the pit boss was and "doing strange things with their hands." See the story A federal jury cleared a former Kansas City man of defrauding a casino of $100,000 in 2008 by using counterfeit gambling chips. However, jurors convicted him of violating a technical banking law and lying to obtain food stamps. See the story The Hard Rock paid a $650,000 fine after conceding to state gaming authorities that it has had a hard time keeping its own employees in line, let alone the partyers who swarm the hotel and its notorious pool scene. See the story Nevada Gaming Control Board agents detained a group of baccarat players at the Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas, one of the casinos thought to have been victimized by a scam that involves having a player “cut” the deck by dragging the cut card over the top of the deck and slightly separating the cards from one another with an index finger. Using a miniature camera tucked under the gambler’s sleeve, the player records the value and suit of each card and uses the information later. See the story Additional information on this baccarat scam--which could also be applied to blackjack--can be obtained from Bill Zender's column on Willy Allison's "World Game Protection" website For any Surveillance operation in a casino that runs baccarat, these articles are a must-read.

Other Casino News:

The Nevada Gaming Control Board has approved a licensing application that will allow state residents to place sports bets from smart phones. See the story Related story: The Nevada Gaming Commission unanimously approved amendments to gaming regulations that allow the state’s sports books to take action on events other than sports. Possible events include World Series of Poker, national and state elections, and the antics of celebrities. (You should see some of the wagers booked in British betting parlors!) See the story A renewed interest in having Nevada's casino industry pay for regulating and enforcing state gaming laws is being met with the same reaction witnessed nearly a year ago. Predictably, the same casino interests who opposed this originally--though often the same companies have accepted similar plans in other jurisdictions--are teaming up to oppose the plan. See the story Sneaking into the casino will become more difficult for the approximately 1,500 problem gamblers in the Windsor area signed up for a voluntary ban. Biometric technology--and strategically placed cameras, which we know are necessary for facial recognition technology to work properly--will aid in the effort. See the story Sponsors for this newsletter: Casino Surveillance Operations Manual and Gaming Glossary: inquire with booksales@casinosurveillancenews.com If you cannot access the Internet site casinosurveillancenews.com from the computer where you receive the newsletter, please re-subscribe from your home address or other email address. Many of my subscribers may have restrictions on their internet access at work. You can now subscribe to the newsletters from any page of the website at www.casinosurveillancenews.com Mailing List Policy: Our mailing list will never be sold to ANYONE, and we will never send spam. No special mailings will go out for advertising purposes, unless I judge that it will be of real use and real benefit to you, the readers. The only use for this list will be the newsletter and any major flash that looks important enough that you will all want to know. Copyright © 2011 by Jim Goding. All rights reserved. Unauthorized sales or duplication by any means is a violation of law and of the proprietary rights of the author. Purchase this author’s work at www.casinosurveillancenews.com.