5 ms·
What's the point of stealing $1.5 million in casino chips from the Bellagio?
- powera 16y agoI seem to recall reading that at least in Atlantic City, casinos are required to have an entirely separate set (or maybe even 2 other sets) of high-value checks, that can be swapped in case of suspected counterfeiting. I would assume that the Bellagio has something similar in place, and that the casino is quietly getting all the high rollers to replace any checks that they had stored.
- hugh3 16y agoIs it really worth their while for a relatively small amount of money? A known quantity of missing chips is very different to a counterfeiting operation, and I assume if they switch to the new set then they have to go to the trouble of printing up a new new set.
- gexla 16y agoI would think it would be easy to figure out if a chip has RFID embedded, just run a scan. And why all the noise about a thief being stupid for stealing $1.5 million in chips with many of them unlikely to be cashable? This is Vegas where thieves will take the chance at robbing people / stores where they may get away with less than $100. I'm sure the guy would be happy to get away with even a few hundred. With that many chips he could probably make a few hundred by selling the 25K chips as souvenirs. ;)
- gamble 16y agoI think they're overstating how many casinos use RFID. The last time I looked into it, only the Wynn did - and then only to track denomination, not as a unique identifier. (Perhaps someone can correct me if things have changed) The goal is to help security detect cheating by tracking bets at the table games electronically, not prevent counterfeiting or theft.
- X-Istence 16y agoMost RFID tags have a unique identifier in them. You can duplicate said identifiers, but if they are indeed globally unique and can not be reprogrammed then the thief is still out all that money and the chips are worthless.
- iuygtrftghyujik 16y agoI doubt they use global unique identifiers. RFID takes longer to read longer numbers, especially if there are many targets in the same field. So 32bit global ID for all chips would take a long time to read, possibly minutes if it's a table with 1000 chips on it. A 4bit code that just ID'ed value and allowed you to spot if somebody had 'mistakenly' mixed up some low value chips in a stack would be much quicker.
- thret 16y agoOP fails to explain the situation as well as: http://www.minyanville.com/businessmarkets/articles/bellagio-wynn-casino-rfid-gambling-las/12/15/2010/id/31714 http://www.minyanville.com/businessmarkets/articles/bellagio... The casino flags all of the stolen chips, and switches to a new set of chips for all games. If you are going to rob a Vegas casino, take the cash.
- ghshephard 16y agoI've always been impressed that Circus-Circus in Reno would cash $25 chips six years after I had originally won them. I wonder if the US Govt Tracks the money supply that is tied up in Poker Chips from casinos...
- mey 16y agoImagine how much money is made by a Casino in interest on money that they are retaining for more then a few days at a time.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- hugh3 16y agoIf I learned only one possibly-inaccurate thing from Ocean's Eleven it's that the casino is required to keep an amount of cash on hand equivalent to all their chips in circulation.
- sgrossman 16y agoDefinitely inaccurate, but how inaccurate is a bit cloudy. The NV gaming control board/gaming commission isn't exactly transparent when it comes to what the cash requirements are (on-site or in the bank) for non-restricted casinos. http://gaming.nv.gov/documents/pdf/06feb23_bankroll_instr.pdf http://gaming.nv.gov/documents/pdf/06feb23_bankroll_instr.pd...
- toolate 16y agoCouldn't he gamble with them? Put one or two chips down at a time, keep the winnings as "clean" chips and gamble with the dirty ones until they're all gone?
- bryanh 16y agoSure, I'd imagine so. However, just waltzing in and not visiting the counter for exchanging cash for chips might seem odd. Easily taken care of by bank rolling your trips with some real money and "peppering" in your stolen chips.
- hugh3 16y agoExcept that this plan involves having hundreds of thousands of dollars in "real money", and this dude probably isn't that rich (because if he were, he probably wouldn't be risking the whole armed robbery thing). Also, I'm just guessing what he looks like under that helmet, but I'm guessing your typical armed-robber type wouldn't fit in well at the high roller table.
- blantonl 16y agoAnyone who shows up and throws down anything larger than a $100 chip at a craps table is going to draw serious attention to themselves from the pit boss and the folks upstairs. People just don't show up at a pedestrian craps table and throw down $25,000 chips, much less $1000 chips. There were probably a very small amount of > $1,000 chips at a craps table anyway, and their only real use would be to pay out to a big winner.
- bdr 16y agoMaybe to reverse-engineer the RFID system for some future purpose?
- stretchwithme 16y agoyou don't need to commit a crime to get one chip to experiment with
- billswift 16y agoYou would probably need a lot more than one to figure out their coding system though. Not that I think this is what he did, he probably just grabbed whatever was handy and left.
- hugh3 16y agoYou'd only need one at a time (maybe a few), and you'd get your starting capital back in the end. Also, an armed grab-and-run at a casino has an incredibly high chance of failure; it's a dumb first step to a supervillainous plan.
- modeless 16y agoThe guy didn't plan to steal $25000 chips, he just walked away with what was there. I'll bet there are ways to fence the lower-denomination chips for somewhat less than face value. You could probably sell the $100 chips for $50 each to random suckers on the strip with a good story.
- MichaelApproved 16y agoHow does buying a $100 chip for $50 make you a sucker?
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- Pfiffer 16y agoI don't know either. We must be suckers.
- jonhendry 16y agoWell, if it turned out that you couldn't cash it in, you'd have spent $50 for a piece of plastic and the opportunity to tell a story for the rest of your life about how you got suckered.
- MichaelApproved 16y ago$100 chips aren't a problem to cash in. It's the larger chips that are tracked.
- jolan 16y agoStolen $100 chips are uniquely identifiable via RFID. Why would anyone sell them for half value when they go to the casino and get 100% value themselves?
- waterlesscloud 16y agoTechno-thriller paranoid take on it- $25k chips can only plausibly be used in high stakes room , which is probably considerably less anonymous than the general floor. Assume everyone playing with high stakes chips are photographed and kept in a database, probably a relatively small db at that. Facial recognition software would be a given in such a case, and even if identities are not kept with faces, the face of someone using 25k chips could easily be checked against everyone who has ever bought or won 25k chips. Might not even need software for that, just manually check if the list is short enough. Now you don't need rfid at all, just good records. There's only one place to get 25k Bellagio chips, and only one place to cash them in. Those chips have to be considered worthless in all practical ways.
- acgourley 16y agoWhile we're being paranoid - why not use them to frame someone.
- jrockway 16y agoThat sounds like it will work: Person A: Great work. This week, you're being paid in casino chips. Person B: What the fuck? OK, fine, $25,000 is $25,000, I guess. Person A: <pets kitten while laughing maniacally> Later that day: Casino Employee: OH HAI. What can I do you for? Person B: I won this $25,000 chip and would like to cash it in. Employee: OK, no problem. Let me just scan it with my scanomonizer over here. <Extremely loud alarm activates, police in cool sunglasses jump out from various hidden crevices.> B: Curses, Person A! Later that day in the police interrogation room: Detective: Where'd you get that casino chip, B-boy? Person B: From Person A. Even later that day: <At Person A's stolen casino chip storage room.> Person A: I love looking at my stolen casino chips. Good thing there is nobody around to see me! Detective: SURPRISE! You're under arrest! Person A: Curses, Person B! In conclusion, this is a bad idea.
- hugh3 16y agoThis one-act play is significantly more entertaining than either of the Ocean's Eleven sequels.
- btilly 16y agoI know for a fact that professional poker players are willing to play privately with chips from well-known casinos, including the Bellagio. And the Bellagio doesn't discourage them by being too particular about which poker player returns which chips. I'm sure other kinds of gamblers do the same. This gives them real street value. And if a random professional poker player shows up with a random stolen chip that was won in a private poker game, the Bellagio has a choice. They can refuse to accept the chip back, knowing full well that word will get around and poker players won't want to trust Bellagio chips, or they can stand by the official rules and not accept the chip.
- kiiski 16y agoMaybe I misunderstood your point, but the second paragraph doesn't seem quite right: > They can refuse to accept the chip back, ..., or they can ... not accept the chip. So do they accept those chips or not?
- hugh3 16y agoThey may or may not. The point is that they have an incentive to accept them back under some circumstances. If they do get one of these back in, perhaps the best thing for them to do is to interview the holder heavily about where he got it and then decide whether to honour it or not.
- btilly 16y agoErm, yeah. That's what I get for posting in the middle of the night while I have insomnia. But you know what I really meant. And no, I don't know whether they will accept them back.
- joezydeco 16y agoIf all the chips have an RFID serial number in them, wouldn't they know which chips were used in the poker rooms as opposed to the craps table? You could argue that a poker player could launder the 25K chips back through the bellagio craps table, but I bet any high-demomination chip presented at the table is checked out somehow during play.
- 16y ago
- MichaelApproved 16y agoI've seen this story get covered by every major news source but they all have the same take on it "he'll never be able to cash the big chips". Big fucking deal. He probably never even planned on taking those. No one has actually broken down the denominations of chips he took. How much of what he stole is in $1,000 chips or less? That's the real story to what was stolen. Lazy reporters don't bother asking. No, they just defecate what the AP feeding tube shoved up their nose.
- hugh3 16y agoI've seen this story get covered by every major news source but they all have the same take on it "he'll never be able to cash the big chips". Big fucking deal. Well, this is probably the only part of the story that's actually actionable (gawd, did I just use that word?) from the viewer's point of view. If somebody tries to sell you a $25,000 Bellagio chip for $20,000 then it's worthless and likely to get you into trouble.
- henry81 16y agoI remember hearing a story about something like this and they were able to launder the chips through strippers, who cashed in the chips they received "as tips"..
- dtby 16y agoToo bad Bob Stupak died last year.
- vegasbrianc 16y agoAs engineer for the Casino Industry 99% of the casino RFID solutions on the market track all chips all denominations. The Casino RFID system is used in multiple ways - Tracking players bets - Ensure the dealer is paying out or taking in the correct chips - Accurate accounting - Fraud Prevention So next time you go to the casino remember they are tracking you even when you cannot see it.
- roadnottaken 16y agoThe article doesn't answer the question posed in the title. What is the point?
- biot 16y agoAs the article concludes that such an exercise is mostly pointless, the question serves as a rhetorical device and does not need a direct answer.
- catshirt 16y agoThe question is rhetorical thusl the article doesn't need to answer it directly. I'm still curious of the answer. I think we can assume someone capable of robbing a casino like this would have considered all this ahead of time.
- Semiapies 16y agoThe point is deftly avoided by focusing on the high-denomination chips that nobody with a brain would try to fence and ignoring how many lower-denomination ones the thief got away with. Casinos don't like to admit that they've been stolen from - they like to appear impenetrable. So here, they've successfully fed the AP a line that the theft that happened really doesn't matter, and the AP will spread their marketing for them in every outlet that reprints their stories.
- ZitchDog 16y agoShouldn't be that hard to find a cashier at the Bellagio willing to turn a blind eye for 10 grand.