A story last month on Wired.com, "Russians Engineer a Brilliant Slot Machine Cheat—and Casinos Have No Fix" tells the tale of a group of Russian slot "operatives" who use cell phones "to record about two dozen spins on a game they aim to cheat. They upload that footage to a technical staff in St. Petersburg, who analyze the video and calculate the machine’s pattern based on what they know about the model’s pseudorandom number generator."
The team at the home office "transmits a list of timing markers to a custom app on the operative’s phone; those markers cause the handset to vibrate roughly 0.25 seconds before the operative should press the spin button."
Why 0.25 of a second?
"The normal reaction time for a human," the article goes on, "is about a quarter of a second."
Of course, not every timed play yields a winner; there are too many variables for that and the operatives certainly can’t win every time they hit the Spin button. However, enough are successful for the machine to pay out more than it’s programmed for. "Individual scammers typically win more than $10,000 per day."
This particular technique came to light in June 2014 at Lumiere Place Casino in Missouri and some operatives were caught the following December, also in Missouri.
But when others were caught a year later in Singapore, they revealed an updated set of tricks: "What they’ll do now is they’ll put the cell phone in their shirt’s chest pocket, behind a little piece of mesh." That way, "they don’t have to hold it in their hand while they record." Also, operatives are believed now to stream video back to Russia via Skype, "so they no longer need to step away from a slot machine to upload their footage."
And why can’t the casinos fix their problem?
"Aristocrat, Novomatic, and any other manufacturers whose PRNGs [pseudorandom number generators] have been cracked would have to pull all the machines out of service and put something else in, and they’re not going to do that. … At the same time, most casinos can’t afford to invest in the newest slot machines, whose PRNGs use encryption to protect mathematical secrets; as long as older, compromised machines are still popular with customers, the smart financial move for casinos is to keep using them and accept the occasional loss to scammers."
The story concludes, "The onus will be on casino security personnel to keep an eye peeled for the scam’s small tells. A finger that lingers too long above a spin button may be a guard’s only clue that hackers in St. Petersburg are about to make another score."
In the comments about the story, one reader suggested, that if the machines are programmed for a "random delay between when the button is pushed and the machine recognizes the push, then the cheat is defeated."
But then someone reponded, "Until you figure out the randomness of the delay."
So, the cat and mouse game goes on and on.
Of course, none of this, presumably, applies to the slot player who hit two jackpots on the same machine within a week in yesterday’s question. But it does point to the fact that beating the house is getting more and more sophisticated all the time.
