If Carlsberg Made Gambling Cheats, They Probably Wouldn't Be Like This.

In our latest series of articles we will be looking at various cheats within the gambling industry, from software cheats to sleight of hand, by players and the casinos themselves.

 

First though, a little anecdote about, possibly, the best slot machine cheat ever accomplished:

 

Mise en Scene:

Slot machines were invented during the last decades of the 19^th century, and not long after their first inception, the world’s very first slot machine cheats emerged too. Times may change, the machines may become more sophisticated, but human nature remains the same and this means that with every new type of slot machine conceived and produced, a new type of cheat is born as well. And here is the story of, possibly, the greatest, most ingenious, cheater that has ever roamed into the realms of the humble slot machine....

 

“It was a dark and stormy night. Suddenly, a shot rang out! A door slammed. The maid screamed.

Suddenly, a pirate ship appeared on the horizon! While millions of people were starving, the king lived in luxury. Meanwhile, on a small farm in Kansas, a boy was growing up.” Substitute Kansas for some other small-time town, mature the small boy to adult hood and we have the setting for Reid Errol McNeal to enter centre stage. On the 14^th of January 1995 Reid should have become the luckiest man alive on the planet during the course of one afternoon. On that particular Saturday he found himself in the Bally’s Park Palace Casino Resort, in America’s Atlantic City, walking over to the keno desk, he purchased himself $100 worth of tickets, made up of 10 $10 tickets, each with eight numbers selected per card.

 

With odds of 230,000:1, there was no way that McNeal would be able to hit the win eight times in a row, but that he did. The pay-off? $100,000 and the highest amount ever won on a single game of keno in the history of Atlantic City casinos, causing, as you can imagine, an unimaginable stir. His reaction, however, was not becoming of someone who had just defied such odds, unemotional as he was; he had no ID on him to verify him to the casino, and, bizarrely, wanted to be paid in cash- who wants to walk around with $100K in their pocket? Crazy-fool, his behaviour set the alarm bells ringing in the casino executives nose canal allegedly, “this just didn’t pass the smell test" he said.

 

The law in New Jersey states that any person wishing to claim more than $35,000 from gambling winnings needs to be verified by the state’s gambling division officials, and upon their arrival at the Bally’s Park Palace Casino Resort players and staff weren’t shocked by the appearance of two state troopers. The state troopers accompanied McNeal to his hotel suite, where they met his friend, Ronald Harris. At this point in the proceedings, the troopers were there merely to investigate the strange atmosphere that the win had instilled within the casino, something was amiss and they knew it. They left Harris in the hotel room, but took McNeal to another room in order to ask him some pertinent questions about his afternoon....downstairs, things took a turn for the strange, it turned out that Ronald Harris was actually an employee from the Nevada Gaming Control Board, the body responsible for the regulation of gambling apparatus in the state of Nevada.

 

Something fishy was going on, and the results of the smell-test confirmed it. The troopers then returned to speak to Harris, who they had left in the hotel room, but when they returned he was gone. They searched high and low, but he was nowhere in the room, they looked behind the curtains, in the bath, under the bed...the usual places, but if he was still there he was giving Houdini a run for his money. However, the troopers did unearth some computer paraphernalia, including computer chips, note books with algorithms, and text books with titles such as ‘How To Cheat The Bally’s Park Palace Casino Resort Out Of $100,000 By Playing 10 $10 Keno Tickets with 8 Numbers on Each Ticket’.  Well, what with the smell of fish and the books, the state troopers began to think that something was wrong.

It took a while, but finally the police concluded that- given the smell of fish, the technical expertise of the Nevada's Gaming Control Board computer technician, Ronald Harris, the fact that Harris could access highly confidential "source codes" allowing him to gain access to the computer programming device within the keno machine's random number generator (RNG), the fact that he was stealth like in his hide-and-seek capacity-  Harris had used his computer to copy the calculations generated by the random number generator in Bally' s keno machine and was thus able to establish the outcome of the results prior to the games played.

 

Following the realisation, the troopers moved in and arrested McNeal in Atlantic City, while Ron Harris was caught by the Nevada authorities at the airport in Las Vegas. They were both charged with fraud by the New Jersey police, but the charges were allegedly dropped against McNeal in return for testifying against Ron Harris, the Public Information Officer for New Jersey’s Division of Gaming Enforcement, Keith Furlong said that "Harris pleaded guilty in July 1998 to attempted theft by deception."

 

Following Harris’ arrest, he was subsequently fired from his role on the Gaming Control Board, losing his $50,000 salary and the job he had worked at for more than a decade. A new investigation was also set up by officials in the state of Nevada, looking into his previous work for the board, and he was later indicted, along with his wife and two friends, with charges of modifying of slot machines across casinos throughout the state, leaving a stinky fish-trail behind him, legend has it that some machines are still rigged, and if you play them at a certain time of day a distinct waft of fried haddock fills the air.

 

During his work for the Gaming Control Board, Harris’ duties included responsibility for slot machine testing in Nevada. Along with his co-workers, Harris would enter a casino and test their RNG devices, ensuring (or not because he was a great big conman) that they worked correctly, and had the approved computer chips installed.

 

The particular chips used in these slot machines are called ‘erasable programmable read only memory’ chips, or EPROM's for short, and they are responsible for controlling the payback percentages on slot machines. The operative words in this story are ‘erasable’ and ‘programmable’, the conniving kipper-stinking-thief used to erase and re-programme the chips with algorithms he had developed himself, and which he knew would force the machines to payout when coins were entered in a specific order. For instance, if 3 coins were entered, then 2 coins, then another 3 coins, then 1 coin, then 5 coins, the machine would automatically payout the jackpot.

 

Because Harris had not won the jackpot himself, but rather his friend McNeal had done so, the police had to charge him with other, lesser, offences, including the fraudulent win of a $9,000 jackpot at Fitzgerald’s in Reno, and a $5,000 jackpot at the Crystal Bay Club in North Lake Tahoe.

 

It was later reported that Harris was subsequently charged by the attorney general’s office on counts of rigging at least 24 slot machines throughout Nevada. He pleaded guilty in September 1997 to charges of racketeering, and managed to scrape a massive 7 year jackpot at the state penitentiary.

 

Once the authorities became aware of such scamming, precautions were taken to ensure that this type of cheating did not happen again. In New Jersey the law now requires that any electronics within keno machines have a source code that is different from other machines in other states, this way people cannot come from outside states and modify the computer chips within the machines.

 

And in Nevada, the state's Gaming Control Board, chairman, Bill Bible, has ordered a review into the safeguards within casinos, to be undertaken by an independent auditor, plus employees working within casino electronics must have their work verified by specialised staff to ensure fair-play.  

 

While clearly a genius in the computer programming field, as with most genius, Harris lacked considerable social skills, particularly empathy- the ability to know what other people are thinking and feeling....if he had this he might just have got away with it. And who knows, maybe there are people all over the world skilled in both and winning money hand over fist! We just don’t know about them...........right, I’m off to learn all about computers (and how to get rid of the smell of fish- I think the key might be a sprig of parsley).....

 

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