What's the point of stealing $1.5 million in casino chips from the Bellagio? | Hacker News Reader

What's the point of stealing $1.5 million in casino chips from the Bellagio?

slate.com

43 pointsstretchwithme49 comments

I 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.

Maybe 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?

They 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.

Erm, 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.

If 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.

Yeah, but we're talking $1.5 million in stolen chips. Circulating that much money is going to take a lot of effort. I mean, I can't imagine you just walk in to a private poker match toting a case of $25k Bellagio chips and everyone just assumes you're legit. You're going to be vetted... big time.

I just don't get the angle. Why steal poker chips when there are other big-ticket items that are much more easily liquidated. Hell, gold has been well over $1000/oz for some time now. A 100 lb gold haul from a few jewelry stores will produce the same market value. You're going to take a haircut when you fence it, but who says you're not going to take the same haircut when you try to pass $1.5 mil in poker chips.

I can reach only one conclusion: dumb criminal.

the big difference here, as a few others have pointed out, is that the guy who stole this chips is an outlaw pursued by the police and the casino is aware that these chips were stolen.

the laundering thing you described actually worked on a large scale for the MIT blackjack team (at least according to "bringing down the house"), but that's because the casino was unaware that these chips were illicit (it also helps, of course, that the MIT blackjack team members were operating within the law - there's a huge different between the casinos wanting to bar you and the feds wanting to arrest you, a fairly major point lost in the movie adaptation).

I'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.

I'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.

Couldn'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?

Sure, 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.

Except 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.

Anyone 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.

I 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. ;)

I 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.

Most 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.

I 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.

OP fails to explain the situation as well as: 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.

Techno-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.

While we're being paranoid - why not use them to frame someone.

That 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.

This one-act play is significantly more entertaining than either of the Ocean's Eleven sequels.

Something like this happened in Belfast a few years ago. Terrorists (or loveable rouges if your American) robbed a bank and accidentally stole $50M - they hadn't realised how much was in the boxes. The bank simply changed the design of the notes making them worthless.

But when the bank issued the range of stolen serial numbers it forgot that a small local firm had paid it's wages in cash from the same batch earlier that day. For weeks there were Police raids on small corner shops when a little old lady used a 'stolen' note.

The 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.

How does buying a $100 chip for $50 make you a sucker?

I don't know either. We must be suckers.

Well, 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.

$100 chips aren't a problem to cash in. It's the larger chips that are tracked.

Stolen $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?

As 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.

The article doesn't answer the question posed in the title. What is the point?

As the article concludes that such an exercise is mostly pointless, the question serves as a rhetorical device and does not need a direct answer.

The 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.

The 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.

I'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...

Imagine 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.

If 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.

Definitely 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.pd...

Maybe to reverse-engineer the RFID system for some future purpose?

you don't need to commit a crime to get one chip to experiment with

You 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.

You'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.

I 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.

Is 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.

I 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"..

You might be thinking of the movie 21, the MIT blackjack team does exactly this.

Thats in the movie "21" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/21_(2008_film))

Shouldn't be that hard to find a cashier at the Bellagio willing to turn a blind eye for 10 grand.

Too bad Bob Stupak died last year.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com