Blackjack Scam Artists Found Guilty

A group of gamblers have been sentenced to a total of eight years in prison for a casino scam that netted them at least two and a half million dollars.

The casinos they ripped off are located in the USA and in Canada. In total twenty five casinos were targeted by the gang, which in total is thought to involve around thirty people. Many of the casinos were tribal.

They used a trick that is as old as the hills, or at least as old as the time when men first found that they could cheat at cards. It is easy to win if you know in advance the sequence of cards that will be dealt, and these guys ensured that they knew just that.

The bribed casino dealers to carry out false shuffles which would produce blocks of un-shuffled cards. These they termed slugs, and when a slug was about to be dealt, signals were passed between gang members to indicate this fact. The sequences of cards in the slugs would be predicted using hidden computers and radio transmitters, and so appropriate betting strategies were employed that would guarantee a win. Generally they were satisfied with winning a few thousand dollars a night, but on several occasions they took home several hundred thousand dollars a night.

The crooked dealers were trained to conceal their false shuffle from the ever watching casino cameras using an over-shuffle technique which made it appear that all the cards had been inter-mixed; whist in fact around forty cards were missed out of the shuffle.

Floor watchers were also bribed to look the other way, and even to point out which dealers were able to perform this particular form of false shuffle. The dealers were well paid for their services, with typical payments being around ten thousand dollars a week, considerably more than their casino wages.

This kind of false dealing scam is not new to casino bosses, and it is one of the things they worry about. Card counting they can take in their stride, after all there is nothing illegal about it, but this kind of cheating is both difficult to detect and has the potential to undermine profits severely.

Blackjack is perhaps the most common casino game that players try to win using various scams. Some of these scams have also been tried on online casino sites too.