The biggest player we know of in this market is Gaming Partners International, a company based in Las Vegas that manufactures and supplies casino table games and equipment to casinos worldwide, including chips, plaques, and jetons.
Although based in Vegas, the company also has officers in New Jersey, Gulfport Mississippi, France, and Mexico, the latter being where they told us their chips are manufactured. We've heard of other companies having chips manufactured in China and Europe.
GPI was a pioneer in the use of security features for chips, including RFID (radio frequency identification) technology devices that signal secret serial numbers. Special equipment linked to the casino's computer systems and placed throughout the property identifies legitimate chips and detects fakes. The chips are created, machined, and finished using very specialized equipment, and other standard security measures include the use of artwork of a very high resolution or of photographic quality, custom color combinations on the chip edge (edge spots) that are usually distinctive to a particular casino, and sometimes UV markings are made on the inlay. All these measures, plus casino surveillance efforts and the familiarity of floor staff with their casinos' unique chips, all results in a relatively low rate of counterfeiting -- in Nevada it used to average about a dozen cases a year, but last year there were only six instances, not involving huge sums.
In 2004 a Reno casino was taken for $26,000 in a counterfeit-chip scam, which was one of the biggest hits reported to the Gaming Commission in recent years, but counterfeiting is on the increase overseas. In reality, it's less often the casinos that tend to take a hit from fake chips and more likely to be individuals who naively accept a chip from a stranger in lieu of cash, which is actually a violation of the Nevada State Gaming Control Board's Regulation 12, governing chips and tokens, which states that chips have no cash value, are the property of the casino, and are not to be used for any other purpose other than to represent a real cash value at the gaming table.
