Recent slot machine frauds have involved high-tech efforts including reverse engineering, sequence-readings and soldering the jumper wires that run between memory cards. But even in the early days of 19th century slot machines, hackers found innovative ways to access fraudulent payouts. The Grande Vegas bonus casino sets out on a journey to learn about some of history’s hottest slots heists.
Slugs
Since the earliest day of slot machines, slugs have been a challenge for casinos. Slugs are led and steel disks, shaped into the size of a quarter, so it could fit into a slot machine’s coin bucket. The machine reads those disks as real coins and then pays out real money prizes for machine wins.
At one point, Vegas casinos were losing upwards of $50 million every year to “sluggers” and authorities collected more than 4 ½ tons of slogs from Vegas casinos alone which accounted for 60,000 slugs, equivalent to about $20,000.
Typically, sluggers would use the metal from tire-balancing weights that they would scavenge in auto junkyards. Others tried to hammer nickels into the size of quarters. Religious medals were used along with parking lot tokens, jet engine spacers from airfields and, once, hollowed-out coins which spies used to use to hide microfilm.
Coins from foreign countries were often used as a slot machine token – the 1985 Mexican one-peso coins were accepted as quarters , even though they were worth ½ of a penny. Cheaters wanted to create disks that would be “read” by the slot machine as a coin or a casino token.
One of the most prolific sluggers was Louis “The Coin” Colavecchio, During his career as a coin-maker, Colavecchio’s homemade minting created such realistic fake coins that even casino security couldn't tell the difference. It’s estimated that, by the time he was caught, Colavecchio had introduced over $100,000 worth of fake coins into American casinos.
He was arrested in 1998 and law enforcement officials were forced to rent storage facilities to house his extensive equipment. After a 2nd prison sentence, he revealed the secrets of his operation – this data is still being used by casinos today to prevent future slug scams.
Today’s slot machines don’t accept coins so the slugfest has ended. That doesn’t mean that cheaters have given up.
Monkey Paw, Light Wand and Top Bottom Joint
The top-bottom joint was Tommy Glen Carmichael’s first casino invention. It was a metal rod in which one end was bent. The bottom of the top-bottom joint was a long wire which cheaters would run up through the coin chute. The top would then jam the coin slot and the combination would activate the payout mechanism.
New casino safeguards made it too dangerous to use the top-bottom joint so Carmichael then designed the Monkey Paw – a device made of a guitar string attached to a metal wand. The string would be placed into a machine’s air vent, creating a “paw” that was supposed to trip a microswitch which would then trigger a payout. No bet was needed to activate the paw.
Two other Carmichael inventions were the Light Wand and the Kickstand. Carmichael invented the Light Wand after the introduction of Random Number Generators – hardware devices that power slot machines by generating numbers randomly. Video gaming machines use RNGs in order to assure players that all sequences created by the slot machine (or any other video gaming machine) are completely random.
The Light Wand was a light that would trigger an electronic sensor in the slot machine to alert the machine that it should deliver a payout. The Kickstand was designed specifically to be used on the Crazy Taxi slot machine. A Kickstand scammer would tilt the console to a specific angle so that the Kickstand on the back could support the machine at an angle to, effectively, create a cheat code input and gain unlimited cash prizes.
Carmichael ran his scams for decades but he was finally convicted of fraud in the 1990s and served prison time. After he got out of prison he became an advisor to the casino industry, using his deep knowledge of slot machines to help casino operators fight cheaters. His last invention was “The Protector” which blocked cheating devices from being inserted into slot machines.
Microchip Swap
Ronald Dale Harris worked with the Nevada Gaming Control Board in the 1990s. He was responsible for checking casino software for flaws that could allow scammers to scam the slot machines digitally. Harris used his expertise and his access to the machines’ source codes to modify specific slot machines so that they would make large payouts whenever his pre-programmed sequence and number of coins were inserted. He operated from 1993 to 1995, stealing thousands of dollars and executing one of history’s most successful casino scams.
Harris’s scam was undetected until he shifted his focus to the game of Keno. He developed a different program for Keno which was designed to trick the software into choosing numbers that he would pre-program into the software. When an accomplice used the program in an Atlantic City casino, investigators traced the hacked computer back to Harris and he was arrested.
RNG Hack
Dennis Nikrasch started out as a locksmith but in the 1980s he figured out how to rig mechanical slot machines. He was caught and served a prison term but upon his release, he returned to Las Vegas and learned how to manipulate RNGs while his cohorts distracted security. It’s estimated that, over the course of his life of crime, he stole over $15 million from Atlantic City and Vegas casinos. He served a second sentence and, since 2004, hasn’t entered a casino.
21st century slot machines have come a long way from the slots of the past but the excitement and thrills will never end.
