At the Lumiere Place Casino in St. Louis, at the beginning of June 2014, accountants noticed something strange among some of their slot machines. All of the machines are programmed with a fixed house edge. Over the long run, there is a certain return to player (RTP) for every machine. For every dollar played on the machine, a certain amount is given back to the player and a few cents are kept for the casino.
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On June 2 and 3, however, several slot machines on the Lumiere Place floor gave back much more money than they should have, even though no major jackpots had been hit on those machines during those two days. Since modern slot machines are controlled by carefully constructed computer code that doesn’t deviate from one day to the next, the only possible explanation for the anomaly was cheating.
Hack Video Slot Machine Games
The casino eventually spotted the man they were looking for after reviewing their security tapes. He didn’t fit the usual profile of a slot machine cheat. He didn’t seem to tamper with the machines in any way, and he didn’t make use of any strange device. He did, however, hold his cell phone up to the screen in an odd way as he played his first spins on the slots that he chose — all of which happened to be made by Australian manufacturer Aristocrat Leisure.
Spin, Win, Repeat
The man would sit and play at his chosen slot like any other player, but holding his phone up close to the screen as he did so. After a few minutes, he would get up and walk away. Then, shortly after, he would return, seemingly deciding to give the machine another chance.
Somehow, that decision to come back and try his luck once more always paid off. Several times he turned as little as $20 into more than $1300. He would then take his winnings and move on to another machine to repeat the whole process over again. All in all, he managed to rack up about $21,000 in winnings over his two-day streak.
The Right Slot At The Right Time
As they watched the tapes, the only thing casino security noticed that seemed strange (other than the cell phone) was that when this man returned to play his chosen machines the second time, he would sit with his hand hovering over the spin button for quite a long time before he’d finally smack it quickly, like a contestant buzzing in to answer on a game show. Most slot players don’t behave this way. They merely spin one after another until they’re done with the game.
He’s Not Alone
On the 9th of June, Lumiere Place shared what they had found with the Missouri Gaming Commission, who issued an alert to other gaming establishments in the state. Several casinos discovered that they’d had their slots cheated in the same way, but not by the same man. There appeared to be a small crew operating. Each casino found recorded evidence of someone holding a cell phone close to the screen of an Aristocrat Mark VI slot machine just before they would enjoy an incredible run of good luck.
Bellator schedule 2020. Authorities in Missouri were able to identify the Lumiere Place suspect by examining rental car records. He turned out to be Murat Bliev, a 37-year-old Russian. He had already gone back to Russia on June 6th, but the organisation he worked for — based out of St. Petersburg and apparently employing dozens of slot machine cheats who work around the world — quickly sent him back to the U.S, to meet up with another crew. Bliev’s return would prove to be the end of his lucky streak.
Hacking The House Edge On Slots
There has been a surge of slot machine cheats coming from Russia since 2009 when virtually all gambling was made illegal in the country. Trying to recoup some of their investment, thousands of casinos throughout the country began selling off their gaming equipment to whoever would buy it, including slot machines. At least some of those slot machines wound up in the hands of hackers, eager to try their hand at cracking the internal algorithms and finding the keys to sure wins.
Austrian game designer Novomatic also turned out to be particularly vulnerable. Central and eastern European casinos began reporting a highly improbable number of large payouts occurring on the company’s slot machines by early 2011.
Novomatic’s engineers inspected the slots, but couldn’t find any evidence of tampering. The only logical explanation was that someone, somehow, had figured out how to predict the behaviour of their slots. In February 2011, Novomatic sent a notice to their customers that included the following statement, “Through targeted and prolonged observation of the individual game sequences as well as possibly recording individual games, it might be possible to allegedly identify a kind of ‘pattern’ in the game results.” Identifying those patterns in results would take an amazing effort — but it’s not impossible.
The results of any spin on a digital slot machine are controlled by what is known as a pseudorandom number generator. Most often casinos and slot makers simply refer to it as a random number generator, or RNG. The truth is, though, that no number generated by a computer can be truly random. It can be seemingly impossibly difficult to predict what number the computer will pick, but because of the way computers work, it can never be truly random.
A computer’s RNG takes an initial number, known as the random seed, and acts upon it using other naturally changing numbers, like the number of seconds remaining in the current minute, for example. Following the code of whoever programmed the computer, it will make several calculations with varying numbers to generate the pseudorandom result.
A number generated this way is, indeed, extremely difficult to predict, but it gets easier if you have access to the computer and the code that’s being executed. If you know what ingredients are being mixed up in the pot, you can follow the same recipe to arrive at the same result.
Just knowing how a given computer generates its random numbers is not enough to pull off this impressive scam though. The random seeds are going to be different at different times and from one machine to another. In order to get the desired result, the hackers would also need to analyse how the slot is currently playing to find a pattern. This would require time and plenty of computing power. While one might have plenty of time in the casino, bringing along the computing power could pose a problem.
An International Effort
Darrin Hoke, a casino security expert who was working as the director of surveillance at L’Auberge du Lac Casino Resort in Lake Charles, Louisiana, heard about the scam in St. Louis and decided to see just how big the operation really was. He was eventually able to identify about 25 people who were working this scam in casinos all over the world, including California, Romania, and Macau.
By digging through hotel registration records, Hoke also found that two of Bliev’s accomplices from St. Louis had moved on to the Pechanga Resort & Casino in Temecula, California. The California Department of Justice managed to detain one of them, confiscating four cell phones and $6000 in cash.
The cell phones recovered at Pechanga combined with information from the Missouri and European investigations finally gave investigators the answers they were looking for. According to Las Vegas casino security consultant Willy Allison, the Russian players would use their phones to record about 20 to 30 spins on the slots they intended to cheat. The recorded spins would then be uploaded to a technical team in St. Petersburg who would use their knowledge of the slot machine’s RNG along with the recording to determine the current spin pattern. The player would then receive a list of timing markers through a custom app on their phone. The app would make the phone vibrate just a fraction of a second before the optimal time to spin for a win.
The players are not successful with 100% of their timed spins, but they still result in abnormally high payouts. Most of the operatives working this scam will keep winnings to about $1000 per machine to avoid drawing attention to themselves. They can typically pull about $10,000 per day from the slots. A crew of four or more working various casinos could rake in more than $250,000 in a single week.
Coming Back For More
On the second of his last two trips to the U.S. in 2014, Bliev flew into Chicago’s O’Hare Airport and headed to St. Charles, Missouri to meet up with three other men. The four had planned to spend a few days working casinos in Missouri and western Illinois.
On December 10, security personnel at the Hollywood Casino in St. Louis spotted Bliev and it wasn’t long before the four-man crew was arrested. Because they had worked their video slot scam across state lines, they were charged with conspiracy to commit fraud by the federal government.
Three of the men, including Bliev, accepted plea bargain deals and were sentenced to two years in federal prison to be followed by deportation. The fourth is a Florida resident who was granted religious asylum in 2013. He is still awaiting sentencing, reportedly because he continues to cooperate with authorities and is assisting the FBI with ongoing investigations.
Exploring New Horizons
In 2016, authorities in Singapore got a bit more information when they caught and prosecuted another of the St Petersburg organisation’s crews. One Czech member gave up some details of the organisation’s financial structure and operational tactics. He reported that about 90% of the money generated through the scam goes back to St. Petersburg. In addition, the teams have begun putting the cell phones in a shirt pocket behind a piece of mesh so they can record the reels without being so obvious. They may also be streaming those initial spins back to the technical teams via Skype, eliminating the need to walk away from the machine and upload a recording.
App To Hack Slot Machines
The cases in Missouri and Singapore seem to be the only two where the group has been prosecuted, though there have been some reports of individual casinos catching and banning players who seemed to be participating in this scam. More recently, some South American casinos have reported Russian gamblers who seem to have cheated them out of money on older Novomatic slot machines.
In the end, the St Petersburg slot machine hackers will most likely continue to do very well for themselves. The realities for the casinos and their customers don’t leave much room for anything to change. There is no easy fix for the machines that are already out there. The only real solution would be to pull all the games off the casino floors and replace them with something else, which neither the manufacturers nor the casinos are going to do. As long as the games are popular with their regular players, it is, in the long run, still in their best financial interest to leave the slots on their floor and deal with the occasional cheat.
Most slots players have dreamed about using slot machine hacks and cheats to bring down the house. I’ll walk you through some of the most successful slot machine cheats, as well as some outdated techniques that will fail every time.
Rng Slot Machine Secret
Some of these video slot machine hacks and cheats used to work, but they don’t any longer. Before I begin, let me start with a disclaimer. Hacking slot machines is against the law in most countries. I do not advise it, and LegitGamblingSites.com does not endorse it.
Let’s see how slot machines work and whether you can cheat slots today.
Casino Slot Machine Hacks
There are some slot machine hacks that worked on old-school slots. I don’t recommend trying these today. They won’t work on modern slot machines which have evolved to deal with them. If you try these and get caught, you’ll likely get banned from the casino for life. Nonetheless, they did work once upon a time, and if you happen to find a classic slot machine in a bar, you might be able to try some of these.
The Yo-Yo Slot Hack
I have a confession to make before I tell you about this slot hack. I have used this successfully, but not on slot machines. I pulled it off once or twice on the vending machines in my high school and scored a free bottle of Coca Cola or two.
The idea is to tie a thin string around a coin and deposit it. When a deposit is registered, you yank the string and pull it out. If you know anything about modern slot machines, you probably just laughed out loud. Out of all the slot machine hacks and cheats, this most definitely would not work today.
The Counterfeit Coin Trick
Before scanning technology became widespread, slot machines used to accept bets based on the weight of the coin. The question of how to hack slot machines had a real answer: Use fake coins which were the same weight as real ones. They used similar metals or hard material, and they got away with it for a long time.
Again, technology has caught up and rendered this slot machine cheat impotent. Ask any experienced player, and they’ll tell you that it’s difficult enough to get a slot to accept some real coins, never mind counterfeit ones!
Tampering With Payout Switches
Throughout gaming history, slot machine hacks and cheats have brought on some hilarious inventions. A number of them involve guitar strings and metal wires. At one point, players would attach hooks and metal claws to the end of metal wire or strings and feed it through the cooling system of the slot machine. They’d rattle around for a while, and eventually, they’d hit the payout switch.
This hack would never work on an electronic slot machine. To understand why, you should read our report on Random Number Generators (RNG). There are no physical switches which activate payouts in modern slot machines. The only thing tampering with slot machines will get you these days is a place on the sidewalk when the casino security team catches you.
Slot Machine Cheat Codes
As slot machines evolved past basic mechanical parts and made use of technology like RNGs and electronic sensors, computer programmers became a key part of keeping them honest.
What happens when the computer programmer who’s supposed to do his job lets temptation get the better of him? Just ask Ronald Dale Harris. He was in charge of finding and fixing software flaws. He was a high-level programmer and worked for the Nevada Gaming Control Board in the 1990s. One day, for whatever reason, he decided to modify some slots so it would pay out when he entered a certain sequence of coins.
Harris got away with this for a long time, but his accomplice got busted when they tried the same thing on keno. Harris was locked up for seven years, but he got out in two for good behavior. I doubt he has ever tried to hack casino slot machines again, especially since all Vegas casinos have banned him.
A Mobile Slot Machine Hack Which Really Worked
What happens when you take cash-rich American casinos, Russian mobsters, high-tech equipment, and a team of jet-setting slot players and put them together? No, this isn’t the plot of a bad B movie, this slot machine hack really happened. In fact, it may still be happening today.
In the summer of 2014, a casino in St. Louis noticed some of its machines had paid out much more than they should have according to their payback averages. After watching the security footage of the casino, they found the same man winning again and again, and they knew he was a slot machine hacker right away. They just had to figure out how he was doing it. They noticed three things:
He was holding his iPhone close to the screen when playing
He was winning on Aristocrat slots
And he was “jabbing” the spin button suddenly after long pauses
It soon became apparent that lots of other casinos had been the victims of slot machine hacking, and the same man was involved in most of the slot machine hacks and cheats. Authorities tracked down Murat Bilev and discovered he was part of a Russian team which had successfully hacked slots from the United States to Macau, bilking the casinos for millions.
After arresting him on a return trip to the US, Bilev spilled the beans. He was part of a Russian slot machine hacking team which figured out the exact timing of how the PRNGs work in Aristocrat slots. His phone was equipped was a slot machine hacking app which told him exactly when to press the spin button, hence the sudden hand movements after long pauses.
Bilev was sentenced to two years in prison and deported from the USA. However, authorities worry that the scam has evolved and there are still teams out there using slot machine hacks and cheats today.
Are slot machine hacking apps available online? Yes, but if you get caught using them, you’ll end up in the slammer like Murat Bilev. I’d strongly advise against it.
What If You Do Discover a Slot Machine Hack?
If you do figure out how to hack casino slot machines, you’ll face a moral and legal choice: to steal or not to steal.
I’d advise you not to. You see, there’s an alternative option, and it could be just as lucrative. Contact the casino slot machine company, tell them you’ve found a bug, and make a contract for a reward if you show them and are proven correct.
Hack Slot Machine At Casino
Some slots companies will dismiss you as a quack, but believe it or not, lots of them will give you an audience, especially if they suspect there’s a bug in their slot machine software.
Heck, you could even get a job as a consultant. After all, you’ve figured out a slot machine flaw that their coders didn’t recognize.
Wouldn’t a nice consulting job be better than risking jail time?
Can You Really Hack Slot Machines?
If you read the full article on slot machine hacks and cheats above, then you’ll know the answer is yes. But it takes some serious skills and connections. Both of the successful slot machine hackers mentioned here ended up in prison. And you have to ask yourself, is it really worth it?
I personally don’t think so. For me, slot machines are about the thrill of potentially winning a life-changing jackpot. I don’t even particularly want to win by cheating. I’d worry about being found out and having to look over my shoulder for the rest of my days.
Hack Slot Machines Electronic Devices
Instead, I advise you to relax, have fun, learn all you can about how slots work, and forget slot machine hacks and cheats. If there’s such a thing as karma, you might even get rewarded for deciding not to try slot machine hacks!