Baccarat Scam Nets Casino Gang $1.3 Million

The NagaWorld casino in Phnom Penh, Cambodia has started reviewing its baccarat game policy, after a gang of fraudsters managed to exploit a loophole in the dealer’s shuffle to the tune of US$1.3 Million.
Despite using an auto-shuffler at the casino to shuffle the deck of cards, a second manual shuffle is then carried out by the dealer as a courtesy to customers to show no cheating is taking place.
Ironically, it was this courtesy which was exploited by the gang who had three female dealers along with pinhole cameras in place at the baccarat table.
The cameras would then record a riffle performed by the dealer with the results being relayed to the gang players via an accomplice.
Bizarrely, the fraudsters would first need to request ten free games without bets so as to analyse the order of cards recorded by the camera before the sequence of the remaining cards was established.
After casino staff became alerted to above normal win rates for the baccarat game the net soon closed in on the gang and it wasn’t long after one of the dealers was arrested that she revealed the intricate details of the fraud to police.
However, the two other female dealers managed to escape capture along with two Malaysian nationals who are subsequently believed to have fled the country.
The casino is now reviewing its policy of allowing the dealer the extra shuffle and meanwhile, commenting on the whole incident, a source at ‘Inside Asian Gaming’ magazine said:
“Players will always be looking to find ways to cheat casinos and electronic ways of cheating are harder to detect than most. Casinos increasingly have to rely on monitoring how much players are winning and seeing if it really is plausible. Everyone thinks it’s easy being the house and you always win but this demonstrates that it really isn’t as simple as you’d think.”