In recent years, great steps have been taken toward increasing casino-chip security, so counterfeits are rare, but not unheard of.
Casino security and surveillance staff are always on the lookout for any unorthodox goings on, like someone trying to introduce bogus chips into a game, so that's the first line of defense. Also, at the basic level, every casino has a unique set of chips, even if it's part of a greater company and, outside of Nevada, a chip can only be cashed at the cage of the casino that issued it. That means that staff are very familiar with their chips and would be more inclined to spot an anomaly, in the same way that fake I.D. is far more likely to be spotted in the state where it's meant to have been issued, where security staff look at authentic cards every day, than in another part of the country, where the look of the card is unfamiliar.
The majority of casino chips today are made of a mixture of clay-like materials -- similar to cat litter -- and are compression molded at approximately 10,000 psi (70 MPa), at 300 °F (149 °C), making them highly durable. The exact process for constructing them is a closely guarded industry secret, which varies slightly from one manufacturer to another, but one key element is the fact that the edge spots, or inserts, are not painted on: The clay is removed and replaced by a different color, an expensive process requiring very specialized equipment that would not be easy for a counterfeiter to acquire.
These days, any inlay artwork on the chip (added prior to the compression process) tends to be of very high resolution and, combined with the distinctive custom-color combinations on the edge spots, helps to clearly distinguish them. Other security features, can include UV markings on the inlay, or the inclusion of radio frequency identification (RFID) technology. In the latter instance, each chip contains a unique tag that is encoded with its monetary value, making it instantly identifiable when it comes in contact with an RFID reader.
This technology improves the accuracy of chip counting and cage inventory procedures, in addition to constituting a high level of security protection. It's virtually impossible to make a fake RFID chip from scratch, and even if someone was able to fabricate one -- and install the exact same RFID tag inside the chip -- the fake would not pass in the casino because the readers would detect that the chip was not in the system. The only way it could pass is if someone on the inside, with access to the system, was involved in the scam and entered the fake ID into the database, so the chip would register as legit when it was scanned -- not impossible, but we're talking Oceans Eleven-style sophistication and planning.
Back when it opened in 2005, Wynn Las Vegas was the first casino to introduce RFID chips, but now it's standard across the industry. It was this technology that protected Bellagio when the helmeted "bandit" robbed a crap table at gunpoint in December 2010. The second that the robbery took place, every chip in the house was permanently replaced with a "secondary set" that utilized an entirely different design scheme and rendered all previous chips obsolete. All states require that casinos have a set of secondaries in reserve. In addition, the RFID technology in all the old chips was instantly deactivated, sending their value from $1.5 million to zero.
Still, people do still try to counterfeit chips, like the Missouri man who was jailed after pleading guilty to stealing almost $30,000 from an Oklahoma casino in 2009. William Reece Lancaster admitted to bleaching legitimate 25-cent chips and then dying them to match the Seneca Cayuga Grand Lake casino’s $500 chips. He would introduce the fakes into play at a blackjack table, or even exchange them for cash, until casino security officials eventually noticed a significant increase in the number of $500 chips in circulation and worked with surveillance to identify Lancaster as the culprit. (Obviously, this casino was not yet employing more sophisticated technology to protect its chips.)
Ironically, since Wynn Las Vegas was the first casino to take chip security to the next level with RFID, from 2008 to 2009 the company's Macau property was hit not once, but twice, by counterfeiting scammers. First, in March 2008, a man commissioned an advertising company to replicate the stickers on the Wynn chips and put them on fake ones. Somehow, he managed to exchange 44 chips for HK$220,000 (about $28,000) before being arrested. We're not sure how he got away with it, although a report of the second scam might shed some light.
In 2009, Macau police arrested six mainlanders at Wynn Macau and seized 38 counterfeit gaming chips, each with a face value of HK$10,000. The five men and a woman had successfully passed off 16 of the chips but were caught when trying to cash the remaining 22 at the cage, where the RFID scanner detected them. What didn't make sense in the reports we read was that the chips were said to be "implanted with microchips - which fooled dealers and infrared detectors on the gambling tables -- and made it all the way to the casino cage."
If the casino's chips use RFID, why the need for much less sophisticated infrafred technology? If there were RFID scanners at the tables, there's no way the chips could have passed into the game, so it sounds as if Wynn Macau only has RFID scanners at the cage, but not at the tables, which is bizarre.
The local report said the fakes were spotted because they contained "lower value microchips," but that doesn't make sense either -- they would be spotted not because of their erroneous value, but because they weren't in the system at all. The Wynn organization was pretty tight-lipped about the whole incident, but suffice to say that these days, successfully manufacturing and passing counterfeit casino chips, especially high denomination chips that always attract extra scrutiny, is virtually impossible.
