Counterfeit Casino Chips

Why do we never hear about counterfeit casino chips? It would seem to me that it would be much easier to counterfeit chips vs. dollars. I can see someone easily cashing in $500 a day and living very comfortably.

Casinos have tight $ecurity.
Making passable fake chips would be expensive.
Attempting to cash them in would result in possible arrest, getting bounced at least.
They have better $ecurity than most gov’t facilities.

There was a thread on this topic recently. Check out Counterfeit Casino Chips

Sure it might be expensive, you’d have to expect that you can recoup your investment.

Let’s also assume that you’re willing to risk arrest and prosecution.

I’m wondering if there is some physical property of the chip itself that makes it difficult/impossible to duplicate. For some reason I’m thinking of some kind of watermark visible with ultraviolet…?

Even still, I’ve cashed many many chips and never seen the cashier pay any particular attention to the chips themselves.

sailor, every move you make in a casino is available to the security team from video footage, pit bosses, etc. If you were to suddenly show up at the cashier’s cage with $1000 in chips that they know you didn’t buy or win, don’t you think that that would set off some alarms in people’s heads?

You’d have to use small amounts to stay off of security’s radar, and even then you’d probably have to do actual gambling with the chip or else they’d still notice “hey, this guy comes in every day with a new $20 chip and never stops and plays”. And once you play, they’re tracking your winnings/losings and your buy-ins, and those better add up.

You might have more luck as a supplier, selling $20 chips to people for $5 or something, but it’d take a big operation to cover your start-up costs, and the chances of one of your customers not ratting you out for a better deal from the casino (or a plea bargain) is slim.

Basically, you might be able to eck out a small profit, but the risk/reward ratio is very high. Maybe not “day trading” high, but certainly higher than counterfitting money.

-lv

Despite security measures, it does happen, however:

From this page