Money Wired

Telnaes' invention enabled Net Vegas to emerge. Mechanical slots with electronic odds and every conceivable theme, from Hollywood Squares to Sinatra's signature tunes, were soon linked to one another, casino by casino, offering million-dollar payouts. This was the money machine that built today's flashier Las Vegas. In 1974, before networked slots, Vegas had about 24,500 slot machines, an average of about three for every four hotel rooms. Last year, there were 158,000 slots for 136,000 rooms. And today's slots work much harder—earning six times more per room than 25 years ago, generating $4.8 billion in 2001 and accounting for almost two-thirds of the city's total gambling revenue (in 1974, it was less than 27 percent).




With all this cash pouring into the new Vegas, it was inevitable that thieves of all stripes—from armed robbers to hackers—would see the city as the mother lode. "I used to think I was chasing the real criminals," says Lt. Steve Franks, a 29-year veteran of the LVPD, who spent the early days of his career pursuing drug dealers and now runs the town's financial crimes unit. But "these guys," he says of the casino crooks, "are calculating. They plot everything out. They're efficient."




None more so than Ronald Dale Harris, whose job as a software engineer for the state Gaming Control Board was to write slot machine anti-cheating software. Harris surreptitiously coded a hidden software switch—tripped by inserting coins in a predetermined sequence—that would trigger cash jackpots. After retooling more than 30 machines, Harris and accomplices made the rounds, walking away with hundreds of thousands of dollars. Harris was caught when one of his confederates implicated him after being busted in Atlantic City for rigging a Keno game. In 1998, Harris was sentenced to seven years.




Harris' conviction hasn't stopped copycats. The Internet is filled with pitches for devices—some costing as much as $500—that claim to fool slot machines into giving bigger payouts, or into believing you've inserted money when you haven't. Recently, scammers have used the infrared ports on their Palm organizers to trigger the coin chute door, operated by IR technology, to remain open and release more money than the machine was supposed to.




One of the newest scams involves teams of cheaters at the blackjack table, operating with high-tech equipment and a high level of coordination. The scheme starts when a player—a miniature camera and transmitter sewn into the sleeves of his jacket—sends pictures of the action at the table to an accomplice parked outside. The accomplice runs the card sequences through predictive software on a laptop and transmits the odds to a third hustler—or several—inside the casino who is wearing a pager watch. Information is relayed to the player by either hand signals or whispers. It all happens in seconds, and from time to time the caper pays off in a big way. "These people are real, real good at what they do," says Michael Thomson, director of surveillance at the New Frontier Casino.




The casinos have responded by racing to build a covert Net Vegas: grids of new eavesdropping tools to monitor everything that goes on in and around the town's largest hotels. The casinos use various systems, but the mechanics of surveillance are basically the same: hundreds of cameras linked to banks of video recorders, software that can match physical characteristics to shared databases of the faces, names, and histories of suspicious individuals—all run from hidden control centers.