5 Casino And Poker Cheating Scandals That Shocked The World
5 Casino And Poker Cheating Scandals That Shocked The World
Blog Article
Poker rooms and casinos handle huge amounts of cash, and where there’s a lot of money, there’s always someone looking to get their hands on it.
Casinos across the world invest a lot of time, money, and effort into security and generally manage to keep things safe and secure but, sometimes, things happen that not even the casino security team could have seen coming.
In this article, we’ll look at some of the biggest casino and poker room cheating scandals from recent years.
Security scandals are usually connected to casino games, which makes the Borgata story that much more interesting.
Back in 2014, a poker player named Christian Lusardi was arrested for introducing copyright chips into a Borgata Winter Open tournament.
According to the reports, Lusardi used the fake chips to top up his stack in the festival’s first event, which had $372,000 reserved for the winner.
Not surprisingly, he came in to the second day of the tournament as the chip leader.
However, Lusardi’s trickery was short-lived. Tournament officials quickly detected the surplus of chips and started an investigation while the event was still ongoing.
In full panic mode, Lusardi tried to get rid of the counterfeits by chucking them down the toilet. Naturally, this clogged the pipes, and it wasn’t long before the cause was traced back to Lusardi’s room.
Investigators found $2.7 million worth of chips in the pipes.
Fake chips were of 5,000 denominations and the tournament had to be stopped.
Lusardi was arrested shortly after at another hotel nearby, and he confessed to introducing $800,000 worth of fake chips into the event.
Lusardi was later charged with a different crime and consequently sentenced to five years in prison, and it seems he’ll never face the trial for the Borgata scandal.
Bellagio is one of the most iconic Las Vegas casinos and is loved by 온라인카지노사이트 all types of players, from small stakes casuals to high rollers.
The venue employs some of the best security experts around, but even with all these measures in place, they fell victim to an elaborate scam back in 2016.
This particular scam was an inside job as it involved a craps dealer, Marc William Branco, and two of his friends.
The scam itself was quite simple. Branco’s accomplices would come to the table handled by their friend and announce high-value (hop) bets on particular roll combinations.
However, they did it in such a way that it was impossible to discern what their bet actually was. They would just mumble something that sounded like they were placing a hop bet.
When the roll was over, Branco would pay them as if that were the bet they announced regardless of what numbers fell.
This kept on happening for over two years.
The casino finally caught on after the duo took them for more than a million, guessing correctly in 76 instances over this period. The odds of this happening are 452 billion to 1, so alarm bells were ringing.
The trio was eventually charged with several crimes, and they each got at least four years in prison while also having to pay hundreds of thousands in restitution to the casino.
If they knew how to walk away while ahead, perhaps their scam would have never been uncovered.