Comments on: Casino cheats used house CCTVs to score $32M

By: Itsumishi

Itsumishi — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 11:05:00 +0000

If the aim is to catch casino cheats I’d be guessing that would exclude a fairly important angle.

By: Itsumishi

Itsumishi — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 03:12:00 +0000

Both are problematic. My cousin no longer has any sense of taste or smell after some drunken idiot punched him in the back of the head and knocked him to the pavement just outside the casino. He doesn’t remember anything about it, but witnesses said it was unprovoked. Security cameras managed to capture nothing of it either.

By: Jebus Jones

Jebus Jones — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 02:49:00 +0000

I think you mean the security guards at Crown that have already killed several people.

By: Itsumishi

Itsumishi — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 22:28:00 +0000

That’s the northern states. This is the CBD of Melbourne, spiders aren’t much of a threat here, the drunken thugs that frequent the casino on the other hand…

By: Chris S

Chris S — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 19:05:00 +0000

One of the basic rules of security cameras is that they shouldn’t be placed to allow viewing of passwords or PINs.

Clearly, they shouldn’t be allowed to view pips either.

By: dragonfrog

dragonfrog — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 17:45:00 +0000

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/03/15/cctv_hack_casino_poker/

By: Boundegar

Boundegar — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 17:39:00 +0000

That wasn’t clear in the linked article. Where did you get this?

EDIT: I see he was playing poker, which the H-S didn’t report. The Register article still leaves it unclear whether this guy took the casino’s money, or the other players’. Maybe the reporter doesn’t understand casino poker any better than I do.

By: Brainspore

Brainspore — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 17:28:00 +0000

Somewhere, a terrorist cell is working out a devious plan that depends on using London’s own surveillance cameras to facilitate an attack.

By: dragonfrog

dragonfrog — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 17:00:00 +0000

He colluded with a casino employee with access to the CCTV security network, and who used the security cameras to look over other players’ shoulders and tell him their cards by wireless headset.
So, no, he wasn’t ‘beating the house at their own game’ – unless the house was already using the CCTV cameras to tell dealers what cards the players have.

By: dragonfrog

dragonfrog — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 16:57:00 +0000

In this case, a co-conspirator with access to the camera feeds – maybe in the security room, or maybe using remote access – was looking over the other players’ shoulders at their cards, and relaying the info to the player. That’s clearly cheating, though I don’t know whether it would be legal or not.

Card counting isn’t even cheating – it’s just competence. Casinos that ban card counters can’t even level the accusation of non-criminal cheating – they just have to admit that they only accept suckers as customers.

By: David

David — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 15:37:00 +0000

In Vegas the CCTV is in HD with unreal zoom capabilities. If someone could not only view the video but control the cameras it would give you an incredible edge in games where you’re playing against other players, like the poker room.

Wish they’d mentioned what game was being played. But by the sounds of it, they kept saying he took the casino for the money, I’d wager he was playing blackjack. Accomplices were probably viewing video of the tables and sending him to the ones where the chances of him beating the dealer were the highest. He probably got caught because he bet the maximum each time and won each time.

By: Daneel

Daneel — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 15:23:00 +0000

I’m playing the world’s saddest song on the world’s tiniest violin.

By: Snig

Snig — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 13:59:00 +0000

That’s Vegas. This is Australia, all they have to do is kick him outside where the spiders will get him.

By: mccrum

mccrum — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 13:48:00 +0000

Look, asking questions isn’t going to help out the poor job creators who have been swindled by a card sharp. Who’s right or who’s wrong aren’t questions that are going to soothe the rightfully injured casino owner here.

I mean, 32 million isn’t something you can just make back in a day. Something like that is going to take at least a week.

By: Andrew Whitacre

Andrew Whitacre — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 13:11:00 +0000

I didn’t see it in the article: what game were they playing? Like, if it was 21/blackjack, and you’re playing against just the dealer, the dealer wouldn’t show his/her cards in a place a camera could see. And if was against multiple people, that’s the video monitoring equivalent of counting cards, in impressiveness if not math.

By: beohbe

beohbe — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 12:29:00 +0000

Yeah, apparently he was playing the game “cards”. Ace reporting right there.

By: Mordicai

Mordicai — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 11:57:00 +0000

This is sort of like “they can’t root out X in prisons no matter how hard they clamp down; how are they supposed to do it to the un-incarcerated?” where the answer is suposed to be “by using methods other than force & restriction” not “create a police state.”

Or as someone wisely said, “the more you tighten your grip, the more star systems will slip through your fingers.”

By: Petzl

Petzl — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 10:47:00 +0000

From the article, we don’t know whether he was cheating another player or whether he was cheating the house.

By: Boundegar

Boundegar — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 10:38:00 +0000

I suppose that demonstrates who’s buttering the Herald Sun’s bread, doesn’t it? It’s not clear what information the guy was receiving, but card-counting is not a crime. That’s why the penalty is banishment – they can’t prosecute.

But we live in an age in which corporations are redefining theft as anything that impacts their profits. And our lawmakers seem to agree.

By: Martijn

Martijn — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 10:19:00 +0000

Well, it is apparently against the rules of the game. But I do strenuously object to the word “stolen” being used for turning a game of chance into a game of skill.

By: Stay_Sane_Inside_Insanity

Stay_Sane_Inside_Insanity — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 10:12:00 +0000

Cory, language conventions are like Tinkerbell: if you stop believing in them, they’ll fade away. The recent onset of your street-sign-related crisis of faith regarding apostrophes has caused you to mess up what should have been “people’s houses.” (I don’t know what “peoples’ houses” as written would refer to — multiple nations’ national legislatures, perhaps.)

So, what you need to do right now is clap your hands and say, “I DO believe in apostrophes! I DO believe in apostrophes!” Keep doing that until you truly believe. Maybe travel to the Magic Kingdom and do it there.

By: peregrinus

peregrinus — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 10:10:00 +0000

So the guy is still alive? I’d always assumed if you took a joint for a lot of money you’d be whacked. Buried in a forest. Get some new concrete boots for swimming. That kind of thing.

By: JonS

JonS — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 08:28:00 +0000

I has a schadenfreude.

By: Daemonworks

Daemonworks — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 05:30:00 +0000

Anyone who can take a casino without putting any lives at risk is A-OK in my book.

By: spocko

spocko — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 05:12:00 +0000

Recently the City of New York was trying to bust an Occupy Wall Street person for assaulting an officer. The interesting thing is that the officer perjured himself when footage of the event was found that contradicted his testimony.

People who were there said the person didn’t assault the officer. With no video to show it was a “your word against the cop.”

Interestingly there was an officer from NYPD there shooting video, but the “official tape” didn’t exist because the “camera was off” (despite the light being on…) however other video footage was found, one from Democracy Now. It clearly showed that the Occupy Wall Street person did not assault the officer. This case brings up the issue, “What if your CCTV -like footage shows something that the people who “own” the video don’t want people to know? What if you are the person who needs that footage to show the truth?” Can you get access to this footage? How do you know it isn’t tampered with? What if it is from the wrong angle? This shtory reminds us that just because we are in a surveillance society, we can’t always count on the surveillance footage to be made available. I think that with the advent of wireless video glasses (like Google Glasses with streaming video output) we will have a lot more opportunities to provide evidence in “He said, She said” events when official video “disappears”(BTW, the first Season Black Mirror deals with this issue extensively. )

By: Jonathan W. Hendry

Jonathan W. Hendry — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 04:22:00 +0000

“Person Of Interest” did something like this recently. I believe the computer genius billionaire guy was using his omniscient computer surveillance system to tap into the casino’s cameras. Etc etc.

By: GeekMan

GeekMan — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 03:45:00 +0000

Cory: I was hoping you would be the one to pick up this story for boingboing. Enjoy the sweet, juicy irony.

By: knoxblox

knoxblox — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 03:32:00 +0000

So I guess this means I don’t need that 55-gallon drum of love lube, the ninja grappling hook, or the night-vision goggles anymore…dang.

By: anon0mouse

anon0mouse — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 03:31:00 +0000

Sure, let’s go with: this is the same as “when a mugger uses his victim’s gun against him.”
[sigh]
House always wins = “fair”
beat the house = “steal”…with a gun

By: Ian Wood

Ian Wood — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 03:24:00 +0000

And there’s Ocean’s 14.