The truth about tech detection

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Las Vegas cheat-busting: The truth about tech detection
RFID, facial recognition, optical tracking and those 'eyes in the sky'...

By Will Sturgeon | CNET | 19 August 2005

"The house always wins". Whatever films or books you may have seen or read about beating the Las Vegas casinos - through fair means or foul - reality will always bring you back to that simple statement of fact.

You only have to look at the ridiculously ornate or overblown statues, attractions, trappings and decorations which adorn these temples of gambling to realise these aren't places which are losing money.

Of course they have bad nights - or rather, some nights are less good than others - but they all win in the end.

It helps of course that the odds are stacked in their favour but there will always be those who think they have a way around that. Some of the systems which have come to town have proved successful but some walk a fine line between working the system and breaking the rules. Others go all out in the knowledge they are way outside the rules.

As such, cheat-busting is a vital part of casino-life and something which increasingly relies upon the greater edge technology can provide. It's not that the casinos don't like to lose - the very fact they do is what keeps the people coming back - it's that they don't like to lose to cheats, as that is when the finely honed maths of the house edge begins to fall apart.

Anybody who has ever walked through a Las Vegas casino won't have missed 'the eyes in the sky'. They are everywhere. Thousands of black glass domes, mounted on the ceiling with thousands of cameras watching every table, every machine and every player.

Then there are the pit bosses and the floor security all walking the floor observing every player for tell-tale signs of something being amiss.

But behind the scenes there are also now some of the world's most powerful digital surveillance, intelligence and data analysis technologies working hard to nudge that house edge ever higher over the tiny minority of cheats among the millions of honest players who walk through the casino doors each week.

Tim Stanley, CIO of Harrah's, the largest casino group in the world and on the Las Vegas Strip, said: "There are systems you can use which will mathematically calculate whether somebody is a good player or a cheat."

But being a leisure industry, reliant upon customer satisfaction, Stanley accepts the casinos must be very careful - and as close to 100 per cent certain as possible - before accusing customers of cheating.

Of course the easiest way to spot a cheat is to know they are one already and picking up known offenders is essential but the idea that faces are scanned and their identity called up on screen within seconds of them entering the casino floor, is some way wide of the mark, says Stanley.

"The stuff they show on TV regarding visual recognition is mostly Hollywood," said Stanley.

"There is far too much that can go wrong with a system like that. Even if we know somebody and have them on record, did they shave today, didn't they shave today, there are still too many variables."

But everybody is being watched and offenders still run a risk of being caught, though normally only once they have drawn attention to themselves somehow, with a pattern of winning, identified by instinct or data analysis, or their behaviour.

"All footage is written onto hard disk, not tape," said Stanley, explaining this enables security to search by disk section and scan through footage far more quickly, jumping immediately from section to section.

The rendering of the digital images also allows more detailed analysis while the casino surveillance teams will also have a digital version of 'The Black Book' - the definitive 'rogues gallery' of Sin City's persona non grata - to cross reference.

But lone customers typically still pose far less of a threat than occasional rogue staff who may act with individuals on the inside or outside to cheat the system.

One controversial system, which addresses this issue, is Nora, or non-obvious relationship analysis, which pieces together information about employees, such as former addresses, education, past employment and certain behavioural patterns, and cross references that information with all employee records.

"You may not know that your cage guy and your surveillance guy lived together two years ago, or worked at the same place," said Stanley, "or that the same person deals with each of them separately every Tuesday", though he remains sceptical about using such information on anything other than an 'FYI' basis - accepting enough coincidences might be treated as a 'flag' but certainly not as incrimination.

However, Stanley said there are other casino groups on the Strip which put far greater stock in the value of such systems. And the net is certainly tightening on those who would break the rules.

Staff who come into contact with large sums of money around the casino are finding that biometrics are becoming more popular among their employers, for example.

Stanley said access to the count rooms - through which millions of dollars pass each day - is protected by biometrics, among several other levels of security, and only vetted and authorised staff can access the rooms, under tight digital and visual scrutiny.

"Access to count rooms is controlled by thumb print," said Stanley. "We don't do anything bizarre like iris scanning."

But when that biometric information is included in the data fed into Nora systems it limits the likelihood of a crooked croupier or cashier popping up with a new identity or forged documentation.

Among the organisations funding application development in the Nora area is In-Q-Tel, the venture capital arm of the CIA, signalling in which other areas - such as Homeland Security - these applications have also found a use and what value the casinos put on intelligence.

Another form of tracking technology being touted as a way to eliminate cheating at the tables is RFID. The new Wynn casino has put RFID chips in all its casino chips meaning they can be tracked and counted as they move through the casino and across tables.

At its crudest level this would stop the appearance of counterfeit chips and would also catch players trying to sneak an extra chip onto their stake upon winning.

For example, if the computers detect there are more chips on the table after the roulette ball has landed on black than were there when the croupier called 'no more bets' then it's a given that somebody is cheating and that fact can be flagged up in real time.

And with players all playing with different casino chips, each with a different RFID chip inside, it wouldn't be hard to work out where the extra chip came from. But often such scams have also been picked up by visual monitoring and optical technologies.

On a behavioural level such intelligence could also flag up 'one to watch' - for example a player laying $5 bets while sitting with $100,000 of chips in his or her pocket. This is certainly no cause for concern in its own right but such behaviour would in the past have caught notorious card counters waiting for the odds to fall in their favour or getting their eye in and honing a system.

Subsequent players, one replacing the other at a table, whose bets vary greatly in size but whose chips originate from the same batch could also be identified as potential partners in a system.

But Stanley isn't convinced the cost of RFID technology is justified by the savings of catching these cheats, some of whom are crude, low stakes chancers - not least of all because of the back-end required when so much data is being created and analysed every single second of every single day.

"It's just not ready for prime time," said Stanley, adding that the new Wynn casino's decision to go down this route looks like "buying stuff for buying stuff's sake".

Optical technologies are already certainly in place and have been for some time. Players will have noticed the traffic of chips across a table often appears to have a very deliberate pattern and there are strict rules about how chips are passed and winnings collected. This is to enable effective monitoring.

Carol Pride, CIO of Caesars Palace, told silicon.com that many casinos favour chips and playing cards marked around the edges with invisible inks and barcodes, enabling optical monitoring of their movement and authenticity. Such a system is non-pervasive and reliable and currently far more cost-effective than RFID.

Pride says such systems benefit the business and its customers by enabling the casinos to properly reward those players who play the most hands or bet consistently through a session, with free food, show tickets or whatever it takes to keep them coming back.

Similarly others who place wildly varying bets - perhaps betting $100 when the pit boss is watching to curry some favour, and $5 when nobody is looking will find technology soon stops the flow of comps.

"When we looked at the way we were using optical technology to track chips and cards, the first thing we found is that the average customers in particular weren't being properly rewarded. If you're a dealer you may well concentrate on the higher stakes gamblers at your table," said Pride, adding that optical technology lets the casino concentrate on all customers equally.

Of course, such monitoring, while fairly - and understandably - billed as a customer relations exercise also keeps a very close eye on things should something appear amiss.

Certainly the majority of honest customers won't mind such scrutiny if it means they get free tickets to a show and can be confident cheats are being weeded out.

All they then have to worry about is the wisdom of drinking a foot-long Margarita before getting on a rollercoaster and how much they can afford to lose at the next hand of Blackjack.

Because the house always wins.
 
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