Why don't criminals counterfeit casino chips -- or do they?

They’re just mulitcolored pieces of plastic, right? So why aren’t people trying to slip fake ones into casinos? It’s gotta be easier than memorizing complicated odds tables for beating the house in blackjack… (No criminal intent involved here; just curious.)

Actually, no, they are fairly complex and difficult to duplicate. I’m sure the casinos aren’t very open about the anti-copying features of their chips. And you have to consider what is likely to happen to you if you are caught.

The state of Nevada has regulations on the size and shapes and materials used in chips. Possession of counterfeit chips is a felony. So is having a slug if you want to try playing slots with those.

It’s against the law in Nevada to have equipment on you that could be used to make a slug.

Aside from the colored plastic (or solid plastic with another color painted on) and a logo sticker, I don’t know of any features the chips might have. They do too heavy to be solid plastic – do they have a metal core? If they do, magnetic sensors would be able to verify that the core has the correct metallic composition, and it’d even be possible to encode some data on the chip to verify it. I imagine that higher-value chips have holographic logos or some similar security feature, though for some reason I can’t remember seeing this anywhere. The casino may very well know where all the active chips are at any given time, and would notice any discrepancy.

Slot machine tokens would be as difficult to counterfeit as coins – maybe even more difficult for the high-value tokens, because they’re much larger than coins. However, some newer casinos use a paper ticket instead of tokens. Obviously there are security features in the tickets – the type of paper used, encoded data, date and time stamps, probably magnetic ink. Has anyone heard of any instances of counterfeiting of these tickets?

Professional chips are made of clay, ceramic. Casinos in New Jersey seem to have some sort of automatic chip-counting device.

(Now why do I think that? What did I see in Atlantic City a few years ago? I cannot remember. How odd!)

In any case, chips are made by only one or two manufacturers who take a great many security steps.

Yes, I do know that the mere existence of a law isn’t going to prevent people from breaking a law, but I was pointing out that if you do counterfeit chips, the state of Nevada is ready to go after you. So it’s obviously something that the state cares about a lot.

From January 2004 …

Source: http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn4542

I recall seeing some sort of FOX-type of exposé on scams that included ne’er-do-wells standing outside a casino and asking unsuspecting passers by to take some ships in and cash them in for him since he was barred from winning too much. The scam was that he would give the victims $500 in (counterfeit) chips for $300 cash from the victim and they could go cash it at their leisure.

You may be thinking of the roulette games where the individual players are given specific colours for them the play with. The dealers used to sort the chips manually until these new sorting machines were developed. They just scoop all the chips into a hole in the table and they are sorted and stacked right below them. They are not the same chips that you can take to other tables/games and must cash them in when you leave the table. It makes sense that the central cashiers also have that ability for the ‘monetary’ chips.

Duckster, I was going to suggest that they may be making use of RFID technology, but you beat me and had a better link.

I really don’t get why they would be much use on currency. If the range for currency embedded chips is only a few milimeters, wouldn’t it be much easier to just read the notes ID number using OCR and a feeder? Since with wear and tear any silicon based system is likely to suffer worse than printed numbers on the bank note.

WRONG!
Gambling casino security is a highly developed science. A recent TV show devoted a lot of time to the subject.
The details of casino security were to indicate the complexity of bypassing security measure rather than to show how to approach attempts.

I don’t think it’s that complicated. This is a complete guess, but one obvious way to avoid counterfeiting without anything high-tech, I’m guessing this is how it works:

All the slot machines are connected to some central computer. When someone cashes out, a unique ticket number is generated (probably randomly), and that number and the value of the ticket is recorded in that central server. When you cash in the ticket, it checks to make sure it’s an “active” ticket, then flags it as cashed or removes it from the database or whatever.

A counterfeiter wouldn’t know what ticket numbers were currently valid, nor would they know the value of that specific ticket number, so a fake would show up pretty easily as not in the database or not matching the amount. Unless they were really lucky and guessed. You probably have a better chance of winning the Keno jackpot though.

If anything, I would expect the RFID chips to last much, much longer than anything printed on the note. The printing is by necessity on an outer surface, directly exposed to all the handling the note gets, but the RFID is completely encased in a solid bit of plastic, and has no moving parts. RFID can also be made with a range of a few meters (that’s how EZ-pass toll systems work), and they would provide a very secure method of authenticating money, if combined with strong encryption systems.

A casino dealer I knew once told me that if you drop a clay chip into a glass of water and leave it overnight, it will dissolve.

I never tried it because I didn’t want to lose a $5 and the $1 chips were the plastic speed chips.

The casino chips in the lower denominations are made of clay, and stamped with unique designs for that casino. They would be hard to duplicate, but not impossible. The thing is, the raw materials for making the chips are almost as expensive as the low value chips themselves. For example, you can buy ‘blanks’ for $1 chips, but the blanks are generally close to dollar in value anyway.

For the higher denominations, the casinos often use a metal insert in the center of the chip, again custom stamped for that casino. And the chip itself is often coated in plastic to protect the clay from deterioration.

Each denomination of the higher value chips has a different design, uses different colors, and may have other anti-counterfeiting features the casino doesn’t like to talk about.

BTW, a counterfeiter isn’t going to walk up to the cage with counterfeit chips and try to cash them in. That would be far too risky. Instead, he’s going to put them into action. The easiest way to do that would be to place countervaling bets in a game that has oppositional bets. Betting both red and black in roulette, for example. This may be one reason why casinos disallow such bets. Of course, you could use two people to do it, but it might become suspicious if two people are placing large offsetting bets in the same game.

So, the ‘safest’ way would be for the counterfeiter to simply walk into the casino and use the chips to play a game. If he wins, he pockets the ‘good’ chips and keeps playing the counterfeit ones. If he loses, the chips get taken away and he puts more bad chips in play.

What really stops the counterfeiter, then, is that the casino security is very good, and they have everything on tape. If, later that night the casino notices that table XX wound up with 50 black counterfeit chips in the chip box, they’ll roll back the tape looking for a player who put that many black chips into action during that shift. Once they have him, the tape will go out to the Griffin detective agency, and the player’s face will be on printouts in every casino in the city. The next time he shows up in a casino, he’ll be detained, the police will be called, and he’ll be searched.

So… It’s high risk, a lot of work, and because all the chips have to be used in one casino (the one printed on the chips), you have to expose yourself repeatedly to move enough of them to make serious money. Much easier for counterfeiters to simply counterfeit cash.

I suspect that the vast majority of counterfeit chips are crude jobs done by desperate people who need their gambling fix, not professional counterfeits with professional equipment.

I’ve never worked in casino security but if I did one feature I’d use is some kind of discrete scanner at the entrances. If somebody walks in and my scanner detects he already has a bag full of chips in his possession, I’d be sure to have security people and cameras watching him very closely.

There’s a show on The History Channel tonight about a guy who counterfeited chips.

One of those cable shows told about a guy who counterfeited (I think it was) $20 slot tokens. It turned out that the machine couldn’t tell the difference between a solid sterling silver token and one plated to a certain thickness. He was able to play the slots for way cheaper, thereby coming out ahead.

What they noticed was that for some reason their token inventory was going UP, not down, as you might expect. So someone was creating tokens, and they started being very watchful. IIRC, he had a lot of ‘splainin’ to do.

Someone’s mentioned the Griffin detective agency, but do casinos still routinely cripple/injure people? Or is banning/prosecution the worst thing that could happen to a ne’er do well?

Speaking from experience, casino’s nowdays (dont know about the old days) won’t ‘beat’ someone up, but they will use every opportunity they have to be rough with you. They’ll push you into a special room, they’ll grab you whenever they want you to get up, and if you try to resist, even for a second, they’ll pound you one and call it ‘self defence’.

In terms of ‘torture’ or just general beating up of people, not really. Just some intimidation.

Hm. I’ll bet that’s the one room that doesn’t have a camera in it.