How Do Casinos Detect Fake Chips and Cheat Devices?

One of the biggest challenges that brick-and-mortar casinos must deal with to run their business efficiently, is fraud. For as long as gambling establishments have been around, people have been trying to cheat at the games they provide.

So how do casinos keep themselves ahead of the game? There is a tremendous amount of unseen security that happens in a casino establishment, so much so that people may not even notice its sheer volume.

All casinos, be it digital platforms or land-based establishments, deal with money. Any low deposit Czech online casino, an online casino no minimum deposit Philippines platform or a Canadian casino site has security to protect digital payment transactions. And physical casinos have to work hard to stay one step ahead of the game. Here are some of the methods they use to protect themselves.

Fake Chips

Chips are currency in the casino, which makes them a big target for counterfeiters, but making them is no easy process. That’s down to the security measures embedded in real chips, which makes them very hard to replicate.

Making this even tougher for would-be scammers, is the fact that all casinos use different designs for their chips, and the variations between them can be in the form of marking, colours, style and even weight.

This is a very important aspect because if a counterfeiter went through all the effort and expense to make chips for just one casino, there’s a greater chance of them being caught than if they were spreading the chips around at various establishments.

But casinos take a lot of other steps to protect themselves against fake chips.

RFID Technology

At the top end of casino play, it’s common for higher-value chips to have RFID technology built into them. These signals can be detected by the casino’s systems and tracked at any moment. So if a chip turns up at a table or a cashier’s cage and an RFID signal is not received, that’s a problem.

Ultraviolet

Chips also have hidden UV markings on them, making it difficult for them to be replicated. Standard practice for casino workers is to go through the floats that hold the chips and scan them with a UV light. If a chip’s missing a marker, it’s flagged.

The Trained Eye

Casino workers are trained to know their chips, so sometimes a visual inspection can be enough to catch a fraudster if a slight difference in the shade of green on a $25 chip is spotted, for example, or the weight feels a little off in the hand. This is naturally a little more difficult to reveal, but it’s part of the security along with random audits and chip counting on a shift.

Chip Fingerprinting

Chips come from a mould, and this makes forensic fingerprinting of chips possible as well. That means at a microscopic level, the chips are going to have the same flaws as that mould. If a suspect chip doesn’t match the mould as it should, then it’s not going to be a genuine casino product.

Personal Checks

Another rule that casinos follow for protection against fake chips is undergoing checks on players. Wherever a player tries to buy into a game with a high-value chip of at least $500 a security check on the person will be performed. If the player refuses to give their ID or have their photo taken, well that just makes them look extremely suspicious.

Part of money laundering laws also means that players can’t buy in at a certain level (typically $10K) without validating their ID. Casinos also have phenomenal surveillance systems that can track individual high-value chips, so they can account for where they are at any time. Trying to introduce fake high-value chips is, therefore, high-risk stuff.

That’s also part of the reason anyone who attempts this will typically go for lower denomination chips, with the $100 being the most frequently faked.

Cheat Devices

Cheat devices that are taken onto the casino floor to try and manipulate games are another thing that casinos have to deal with. These are electronic devices that can send signals to players at a poker table from spotters or ones that can be inserted into slot machines to manipulate the mechanics.

How do casinos detect these? Metal and radio signal detectors can help scope these out. But again, the “big eye in the sky”, the surveillance systems play a large part in this. It watches everything and tracks everything, and even the slightest suspicion about something will raise a red flag.

There are also consequences for trying to use fake chips, as it can lead to casino bans, criminal charges being pressed against you and prosecution.