Do Casinos Cheat Slots
Most would call me a casino adversary/player advocate. But in the case of a casino cheating a player, Ron, I would be remiss if I didn't say with 100 percent conviction that the casinos are in no way out to cheat you. There are two key reasons why casinos don't play the game of deception. Most would call me a casino adversary/player advocate. But in the case of a casino cheating a player, Ron, I would be remiss if I didn't say with 100 percent conviction that the casinos are in no way out to cheat you. There are two key reasons why casinos don't play the game of deception.
If you were running an online casino, you’d be wise to want to avoid cheaters. After all, you’re in business to make money, and if someone is cheating at your games, you’re going to LOSE money. If you’re a player at an online casino, though, knowing how to cheat online casinos might be a handy skill set to have.
I’m going to share some ideas about things that online gamblers do to try to cheat online casinos. I don’t encourage you to follow suit, though. I suggest that if you’re going to gamble at an internet casino, you do so for entertainment.
I have 2 reasons for this recommendation:
The first is that cheating is inherently dishonest. I believe in having a moral code, and one of the most basic aspects of most moral codes is honestly.
The second is that you’re unlikely to get away with cheating anyway. Most online casinos have strong security. And the online casino industry is old enough now that they’ve probably seen and heard it all. Good luck getting something over on them.
Nonetheless, here are some techniques cheaters use to try to make money with online gambling:
Bonus Abuse
The most common and probably easiest way to cheat an online casino is to abuse their signup bonus offer. In fact, some players might say that this isn’t even cheating. After all, the bonus is there to take advantage of, and as long as you meet the terms and conditions, how are you cheating?
Let me explain casino signup bonuses in a little more detail in case you’re a complete novice.
When you sign up at an online casino, they typically offer you an incentive to sign up. This takes the form of free chips or credit, usually expressed as a percentage of your deposit.
For example, you might sign up at a casino that offers a signup bonus of 100% of your deposit up to $1000.
However much you deposit, up to $1000, would be matched by the casino in the form of chips. If you deposit $1000, you get an extra $1000 to play with. You’d start with a $2000 bankroll, instead of a $1000 bankroll.
These bonuses are divided into 2 types, cashable and non-cashable.
A cashable bonus is one that can be cashed out once you’ve met the casino’s wagering requirements. (I’ll have more to say about wagering requirements soon.)
A non-cashable bonus is one that cannot be cashed out. Non-cashable bonuses can be further sub-divided into sticky bonuses and non-sticky bonuses.
But first, let’s talk about wagering requirements.
Casinos require you to gamble a certain amount before allowing you to cash out. This usually takes the form of a multiple of your deposit plus bonus. For example, you might be required to wager 35X your deposit plus bonus before you can cash out.
If you start with $1000 and a $1000 bonus, you have $2000 total. With a 35X wagering requirement, you must make $70,000 in bets before being allowed to cash out.
At first glance, a novice might think that’s impossible, but keep in mind that a percentage of the time, your bets are going to result in a win rather than a loss.
If you had a cashable bonus, you could cash out any money left in your account.
If you had a non-cashable bonus, it would be unavailable to cash out, but anything in your account beyond that bonus would be available to cash out.
If your non-cashable bonus is a phantom bonus, that amount just disappears from your balance when you cash out.
If your non-cashable bonus is a sticky bonus, that amount stays in your account. You can’t cash it out, but you can gamble with it. You could theoretically profit from that bonus repeatedly and keep cashing out until you lose the amount of the bonus.
You deposit $1000 and claim your $1000 bonus. You gamble until you’ve hit your $70,000 wagering requirement, and you have $1500 left in your account.
If you have a cashable bonus, you can cash out the entire $1500. In this case, you’ve made a profit. You started with $1000, and you cashed out $1500, for a $500 profit.
If you have a non-cashable bonus, you can only cash out $500. If it’s a phantom bonus, the other $1000 would disappear from your account, leaving you with a $0 balance. If it’s a sticky bonus, though, you could cash out the $500 and go play with the $1000 again. (You still couldn’t cash out the $1000, though.)
Some players are smart enough to realize that if they play the right games with the right strategies, their expected loss would be low enough to ensure a statistical profit.
For example, if you played perfect strategy blackjack against a house edge of 0.5%, you’d only expect to lose $350. That would leave $1650 in your account. If it were a cashable bonus, you’d expect a $650 profit.
That’s just a statistical expectation, though. In real life, your results might be different. The more bets you place, though, the more likely you are to see the expected results. This is called the Law of Large Numbers.
Of course, if it’s a non-cashable bonus, you’re unlikely to profit in that situation.
But casinos thwart this in multiple ways:
For one thing, they usually restrict your play to the games with the highest house edge. If you’re playing slot machines with an average house edge of 5% (which would be better than the average slot machine game), you’d expect to lose $3500 instead of $350.
In that situation, you’d be statistically likely to go broke.
Casinos that don’t restrict your play sometimes only give you partial credit for games with a low house edge. I’ve seen casinos that only count 10% of your wagers on blackjack toward your wagering requirements. This means you’d have to put $700,000 into action before cashing out in our example above.
If you can find a situation where you mathematically see a potential profit from the casino bonus, be aware that the casino knows about advantage players like you. Almost all online casinos have a section in their terms and conditions that give them the right to deny withdrawals to players who have a pattern of betting that looks like bonus abuse.
Is bonus abuse cheating?
In the opinion of this blogger, it’s only cheating if you’re not following the terms and conditions of the signup bonus. If you fulfill the requirements that the casino set for the bonus, you’re not cheating.
The casinos have a different opinion, though. They’ll notice if you gamble just enough to hit the wagering requirements for withdrawing.
Other, More Complicated Ways to Abuse Bonuses
Not all casino bonuses require a deposit. Some of these bonuses are called “no deposit bonuses,” and they just take the form of free chips that you get just for setting up a real money account at the casino. They’re usually small amounts of money, like $50 at the top end. They’re usually lower than that, though–$5, $10, $20, or $25, for example.
One way some players cheat–and this is pretty low rent, but it happens—is to sign up for multiple accounts to repeatedly take advantage of these no deposit bonuses. Even a broke clock is right twice a day, and even the best casino sometimes loses money on a casino game to a player who took advantage of a no deposit bonus.
The amount of money to be made from this scheme is usually minimal, though. Most casinos have a maximum cash out amount that would make it almost useless to even try this.
But since you’re not risking your own money, you could theoretically just create an infinite number of accounts and just keep playing until you win and can cash out.
To pull this off, though, you need multiple fake ID’s. All online casinos now require copies of your picture ID. But since most of them are offshore, it’s relatively easy to fool them with a fake identification. I just don’t think you can make much money doing this.
Another opportunity is to take advantage of a signup bonus and play at the casino on multiple screens. Stick with slot machine games which have bonus rounds. When you win a bonus round, leave that screen alone for a while, then go play more games on another screen. Every time you get a bonus round, don’t play it.
Do Casinos Cheat At Roulette
Just play through your wagering requirement first. Once you’ve achieved your wagering requirement, go back to those screens, and take advantage of your bonus spins. You can make a surprising amount of money doing this—as long as you don’t get caught.
Online casinos are wise to this tactic, too, so don’t expect to get far with it.
Hacking and Stealing: Some of the More Sinister Ways of Cheating Online Casinos
A hacker is a player who uses software vulnerabilities to cheat. This could theoretically take multiple forms. A hacker could get into the system and award himself credits, for example. Or he could modify the probabilities for the games to ensure that he won.
Another way a hacker might get money from an online casino would be to guess a username and password combination for another player and withdraw money from their account. This is probably the easier and more common method of cheating an online casino via hacking.
Most online casinos have excellent security measures in place to prevent this sort of thing, but I assume it’s possible to cheat an online casino this way. I don’t personally know how to pull this off, as I’m not a hacker.
Another way someone unethical might cheat an online casino would be to steal someone else’s credit card or payment information and use it to play the games at the casino. This is harder for online casinos to combat, but it’s also prevented in part by their security protocols in place.
In fact, they have security personnel in place whose jobs are to look for patterns that might indicate this kind of cheating. If you get busted doing any of these sinister means of cheating an online casino, you could face some serious legal difficulties.
Collusion
I only knew what the word “collusion” meant because of my experience with online poker. If it weren’t for that, I wouldn’t know what Donald Trump is talking about when he says there’s never been any collusion.
In the word of online poker, collusion is when you sit at a virtual poker table with a friend of yours (or multiple friends) and share information about what cards you’re holding. This gives you an advantage over the other players at the table because you have more information at your disposal.
Winning while colluding at an online poker table still requires enough poker knowledge to be able to play well. Just having more information than your opponents isn’t enough to guarantee a win for you. You also must be able to put that information to use to increase your odds of winning.
Also, poker sites have serious security in place to prevent this kind of behavior. Among other things, they look for unusual patterns of behavior. If you fold pocket kings preflop because you know your buddy has pocket aces, that’s going to raise a red flag, right?
Other decisions you’d make at the table might be less subtle, but the poker websites are smart enough to notice these patterns when they look for it.
I don’t recommend colluding at online poker rooms. In this case, you need to feel even worse about your behavior, too. Instead of stealing money from an online casino, you’re stealing money from your fellow gamblers.
That’s lousy, man.
Conclusion
Most people don’t know how to cheat online casinos because it’s almost impossible for the average person to pull off. Casinos spend millions of dollars industry-wide to prevent players from cheating them out of money.
The most common cheating strategy—and the one you’re most likely to see some success with—is bonus abuse.
Other methods of cheating are usually just fraudulent and dishonest. I wouldn’t have much respect for someone who stole another gambler’s credit card, or for someone who cheated at poker by colluding with other players.
Do Casinos Cheat Slots
Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus.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.
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.
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.
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.
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!