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£33,000 Has Been Stolen From a Small Number of London Casinos

Nimesh Bhagat and Andrew Ashley worked by day as IT problem analysts for a large casino group. They were successful IT contractors however they used their technical knowledge to devise a way to steal thousands from casinos by forging winning betting slips.

The two analysts stole at least £33,000 before they were caught by accessing software which was used to control the remote betting machines at four London casinos.The pair both admitted the theft which took place between July and September 2007. Due to their guilty pleas the pair escaped with suspended sentences of 12 months each. This scam was concerned with the betting terminals you can find at casinos, these are used to allow punters to place bets on roulette wheels without actually being at the tables. The pair used their knowledge of these systems to print out winning tickets without the win actually taking place. The tickets where then cashed for the winnings.

It was actually quite simple for them to use their their knowledge to ensure that the machine printed out a winning ticket whatever the result of the bet placed. In fact the only reason they were caught was a combination of carelessness and greed. A cashier noticed that a winning ticket contained an impossible payout of 600, the wager had been a 10 pound bet at odds of 35-1 !! Officials where then able to trace back a string of suspicious wins back to the two individuals who were both employed as problems analysts by the casino group.

Both pleaded guilty to theft under the 1968 Theft act. The court sentenced them to serve 200 hours of community service in addition to the suspended sentences. They were also ordered to pay back approximately 16000 pounds each to their ex employers.

Det Insp Ann-Marie Waller said:

These men not only used their intimate knowledge of two complex systems to break the law and make these fraudulent claims, they also breached the trust of their employers.

The convictions are surprisingly, probably the first where individuals have been caught manipulating the extensive computer systems that run the UKs thriving gaming industry.   The use of technology to enhance our gaming experiences obviously brings risks of games being manipulated.

There are many instance of ‘Poker bots’ being used to play online poker games for cash and the manipulation of online roulette games is obviously very easily achieved by quick change of code in a Random number generator for instance!  My distrust of these computer simulated wheels only grows when I read stories like this,  although to be fair even live roulette could easily be faked – I’d like to see the Dublin Bet live video stream cut to the clock in the casino occasionally, although to be honest when I’ve visited the Fitzwilliam Street casino I don’t actually remember ever seeing one!

Did Gonzalo Garcia Pelayo Unlock the Secrets of Roulette?

Scattered throughout history there are hundred of stories of people who claim to have unlocked the secrets of roulette. Lots of them are so long ago that we have little chance of verifying them – now little more than myths. However there are also quite a few roulette systems that have been developed and used within living memory and there’s often lots of evidence available. In fact the story of Gonzalo Garcia Pelayo has actually been the subject of a lengthy court case brought by several casinos who believed he had been cheating.

Gonzalo Garcia Pelayo was originally a record producer, and apparently not a very successful one – however he had other talents including being a very decent mathematician. Gonzalo also had something of a weakness for the game of roulette. One day the thought occurred to him, quite reasonably in fact, that if a specific roulette wheel was not 100% perfectly random then it was theoretically possible to exploit it. He believed that it was impossible that a wheel could be this perfect and that some level of bias towards certain numbers had to exist – the difficulty was how to spot this bias and use it.

He started to conceive a roulette system that could overturn the house bias in favor of the player. To prove his hypothesis that the wheel favored certain numbers he needed the following -

1- Huge amounts of data on a variety of real roulette wheels.
2- A way of analysing the data to identify any real bias in the spins.

The first step is actually quite easy to achieve although it does involve a huge amount of effort. Gonzalo recruited members of his family to ‘clock spins’ and gather huge amounts of data on the spins of various roulette wheels in Madrid. His children in particular would spend hours and hours in the casino simply recording the results of as many wheels as they could, we could nowadays achieve the same data from our homes of course by logging into a live roulette game online. But eventually he had at his disposal a huge amount of data on the results of spins in Madrid casinos.

Whilst his long suffering family had been frequenting the casinos of Madrid, Gonzalo had been developing his system – a computer model written in QBasic a simple computer language I actually learn at school! His program analysed all the data and then assigned a value to each number on the wheel. The basic idea was that the more a number occurred in the results the higher the value assigned to that number. It’s sounds quite a simple frequency distribution analysis although there must have been much more to it !!

What he ended up with was a profile of each roulette wheel, with a list of numbers which would supposedly be more likely to occur. This is the point where most experts (and me) would have dismissed Gonzalo’s secret roulette system as yet another over simplified strategy based on biased wheels or dealer tracking. However the crucial difference in this situation is that he then proceeded to win some serious money. He claimed that his system and analysis had overturned a normal house edge (advantage) of 5% in the casino’s favor to a 15% player edge. Although this doesn’t guarantee winning every spin of course – any sensible player armed with such an advantage would never lose over the longer term.

His winnings from the Casino De Madrid peaked at over 600,000 Euros in one night, overall he took over 1 million Euros in winnings from this one casino. They were convinced he was cheating in some way and took the family to court in order to try and recover their losses. Eventually the Spanish courts all decided against the casino stating that Gonzalo had used only intuition and inventiveness to win. In fact the Supreme court suggested that the casino was largely to blame for using a biased wheel ! Unsurprisingly Gonzalo Garcia Pelayo and his family soon became persona non grata in every casino in Spain.  He soon tried his luck in Las Vegas and apparently made more money there.

But remember if you want to emulate Gonzalo, don’t waste your time analysing the results on normal online roulette games which are merely computer simulations (although theoretically you can look for weaknesses in their random number generator I guess). You’ll need real games, on real tables, in real casinos to look for any bias – there are actually only one or two currently available but I’m sure that’ll change. Dublinbet is recommended – it’s a live feed from a great casino in Fitzwilliam Street in Dublin – so you play the same spins as the punters physically there.