Counterfeit Casino Tokens

Just watched the History channel show about the guy from Rhode Island
that counterfeitted hundreds of thousands of dollars of Casino tokens.
Pretty cool how the casinos were never able to filter out his
counterfeits due to their high quality.


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davewang202(at)yahoo(dot)com

David Wang wrote:

Just watched the History channel show about the guy from Rhode Island
that counterfeitted hundreds of thousands of dollars of Casino tokens.
Pretty cool how the casinos were never able to filter out his
counterfeits due to their high quality.


I liked the part where the manufacturer pronounced them to be genuine. ;-)

Alan
'does not like that machine'

Didn't see the show so do not know if this was the same case, but 20+
years ago another former ANACS authenticator showed me some fake dollar
slugs he had been the expert witness on. Using normal authentication
procedures (microscope and a genuine one to compare it against) you
could easily tell that they were fake, but at a casual glance they were
fine.
As he told me the story, once caught, the creep whined that he was a
retiree down on his luck, who had to do this to make ends meet. The
jury was not amused.
The way they caught him was simple. Knowing somebody was bringing bad
slugs in and spending them, they just kept an eye out for anybody
walking in with what looked like a heavy package. Sure enough, they
spotted a woman with a heavy purse, and followed the couple until they
sat down and took slugs out of the purse and started dropping them into
machines. Security moved in, and found a few hundred fakes in the
purse. Apparently the m.o. was to schlep the stuff in, run it through a
slot machine once, and then cash in whatever the machine paid out.
He did not mention this, but I suppose there was nothing to keep the
couple from going out to a car and loading up the purse for another
run. There were more than 100,000 pieces involved, so this may be the
case.
Tom DeLorey

wrote:
Didn't see the show so do not know if this was the same case, but 20+
years ago another former ANACS authenticator showed me some fake dollar
slugs he had been the expert witness on. Using normal authentication
procedures (microscope and a genuine one to compare it against) you
could easily tell that they were fake, but at a casual glance they were
fine.
As he told me the story, once caught, the creep whined that he was a
retiree down on his luck, who had to do this to make ends meet. The
jury was not amused.
The way they caught him was simple. Knowing somebody was bringing bad
slugs in and spending them, they just kept an eye out for anybody
walking in with what looked like a heavy package. Sure enough, they
spotted a woman with a heavy purse, and followed the couple until they
sat down and took slugs out of the purse and started dropping them into
machines. Security moved in, and found a few hundred fakes in the
purse. Apparently the m.o. was to schlep the stuff in, run it through a
slot machine once, and then cash in whatever the machine paid out.
He did not mention this, but I suppose there was nothing to keep the
couple from going out to a car and loading up the purse for another
run. There were more than 100,000 pieces involved, so this may be the
case.

Different story.

The show is on right now. 1:25AM EDT.

It's about a Rhode Island man who took some Casino tokens, defaced one
and sent it in to a metallurgy lab for analysis, disguised as a piece
of jewlry. The lab told him of the composition of the metal and he
found that alloy was a protected alloy. He couldn't get it, because
apparently some British coins were made out of the same metal, but
he found that a close alloy can be obtained. He use that alloy instead,
and made a bunch of them.

He took the time and made about $50K worth of tokens for all the Casinos
and went around the country spending the tokens. They were so good that
when the tokens were first discovered, they were sent to the
manufacturer for authentication and the manufacturer told the
investigating detective that the tokens were genuine.

He went around doing this for a couple of years, but was finally caught.

http://www.idxinc.com/counterfeit.htm

This show is part of the History Channel's "Breaking Vegas" series.


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davewang202(at)yahoo(dot)com