From using high-tech methods to low-tech cheats like putting a coin on a string, people tried different mechanisms in order to crack slot machines and earn big wins at the casino. To name a few, these the most-popular slot machine cheats. Slot machines are some of the most lucrative games on the casino floor for both the players, the house and cheaters. Even though they’re electronic, slots easily attract as many cheaters as. Numerous hardware manipulations are known to be used by players in an attempt to defraud the casino and take home the much-desired money. Moreover, there were special tools for “cheating” slot machines. Of course, for this scam to work, you have to play in a real casino, because players have to be physically close to the slot machines. Software and Hardware Malfunction Cheats Of course, all of them are illegal, so do not try them as gaming authorities take cheating very seriously and those trying to commit a felony while trying to crack these machines can end up in jail. We’re talking about long-term sentences, so do not ever try them yourself. A story of hackers who made millions of Dollars from the Vegas Casinos using slot machines cheats. This is a story of a group of cheat or hackers from Russia who successfully decoded the algorithm to hit the big winnings every time on a particular type of slot machines. What did slot machine hackers do?.

It worked by simply attaching a guitar string to a bent metal rod and then poking this into the machine's air vent.

He would move this around the machine until he clicked the trigger switch. This then caused a mountain of coins to fall out. This one made us giggle.

In the 90s an arrest was made in Nevada when a woman attempted to cheat on one of the best online to play slot games.

She opened the door and climbed into the machine attempting to manipulate the reels into a winning position. She then climbed back out and shut the door but little did she know or did she that other gamers and security guards knew exactly what she was up to.

Dennis Nikrasch thought he had a great idea when he bought a slot machine for his home. After playing around and messing about with the machine in his garage, he learned about all of its flaws.

He figured out the computer chips inside fruit machines could be re-programmed. Once he figured this out, he manipulated the chips to win jackpots as often as he wanted.

He was even crazy enough to hire a whole team of scammers who could help him tamper with all of the computer chips he bought.

He scammed a lot of casinos for many years simply by switching the regular chips with his manipulated fraudulent chips.

This is different as to how they used to work, with new fixed percentage slot machines been installed with life in them to encourage play.

Other cheats come and go, such as not needing to bet on certain positions on some roulette games for it to pay a win, or manipulating the Internet connection to disrupt or encourage certain outcomes.

They had the roulette wheel checked and monitored the table and the dealer, but they found nothing wrong. Laurent and her crew therefore continued to rack up the winnings.

The owner of the casino took something of a shine to Laurent and made romantic overtures. He began to suspect her of wrongdoing when he noticed that she was always at the roulette table costing the casino money.

She was always seemingly alone and only appeared to be placing occasional bets. Working out that the cigarette packet might be involved he asked Laurent for a cigarette and the game was up.

Louis Colavecchio is a counterfeiter who used his skills to manufacture incredibly accurate reproductions of slot machine coins.

He then used these coins in many American casinos with initially great success. When he was eventually arrested in , following an investigation after casinos had started to notice sizable surpluses of the coins in their inventories.

Law enforcement seized his stash of coins and the tools used to make them. Such was the volume of this equipment they had to rent storage facilities just to house it all.

When Colavecchio was released in he resumed his activities, but was arrested again after just a few months. He brokered a deal to reveal the secrets of his operation so that casinos could avoid being stung in this way again.

Nikrasch, also known as Dennis McAndrew, is another slot machine cheater. In fact, he is arguably the biggest known slot machine cheater in history.

It has been said that he posed a serious risk to the integrity of the whole slot machine industry. He was arrested in while trying to cheat his way to a huge jackpot in a Las Vegas casino.

Subsequently, he agreed to exchange some of his secrets in return for a reduced sentence. Nickrasch had served time in prison before, having been convicted in the s for his role in cheating the mechanical slot machines of the time.

As a master locksmith with mechanical expertise, he had developed a method for forcing payouts from these machines. Although this way of beating slots is not technically a cheat or a fraud, I decided to make it a part of this article.

Slots are programmed by people. And people make mistakes. A programming mistake can lead to a software glitch that can later knowingly or unknowingly be exploited by players.

And I could keep going. The point is that huge wins that happen due to a software glitch are pretty much never paid out. It might instead provide a player with a stream of smaller wins, or misinterpret the money inserted into the machine in a way that favors the player.

Instances of this kind can stay under the radar, and can be exploited by crafty players. You have to be extremely lucky to find this type of bug though.

And even if you managed to do it, you can never be sure that you will actually get to see the money. Disclaimer: the following technical analysis is just my speculation as to what engineers at Aristocrat could have done wrong, and how Alex could have exploited it.

Despite the fact that I took all information available at the time into account, the real exploit could have differed in minor or major details. The simplest PRNG algorithm described in The Art of Computer Programming which gives satisfactory results is actually quite simple:.

This algorithm, known as Linear Congruential Generator LCG , is still used as a default PRNG algorithm in many programming languages e.

Could Aristocrat slot machine developers simply have used the default PRNG algorithm provided by the programming language they used? Or could they have used the simplest PRNG which meets the requirement of uniformity?

This default algorithm works and meets the criteria of uniformity of generated random numbers. It might have met all the criteria programmers were working to in the requirements specification.

The first step is to get to know the exact parameters of the algorithm parameters a, c and m. This is the easy part, as these parameters are written in every slot machine.

Alex just had to read the binary code from the cabinet memory and decompile it. This is a task which any specialist in microelectronics can do if he is equipped with the proper tools.

With the decompilation, you can actually read the parameters of all PRNG algorithms — even the cryptographically secure ones. The LCG PRNG algorithm is generally characterized as easily predictable.

This means that just by knowing 3 random numbers you are able to calculate a, c, m parameters and easily predict the next numbers in the sequence.

He was able to observe the produced random numbers indirectly by watching the positions where the reels stopped in recorded spins. The key point is that logic of a slot game is deterministic and programmed inside the cabinet.

So it can be decompiled, reverse-engineered and simulated somewhere else. The game logic usually takes a random number and uses some mathematical operations to determine where each reel should stop.

The slot machine reels usually have around 50 to symbols, three of which are displayed on the screen. If the game has 5 reels, then on average just one of million random numbers gives the exactly the same result as the one observed by a player.

In fact, the number of spins you need is proportional to the length of the initial random number. If a slot machine used random numbers which are 64 bits long, then simulating all of them would require too much computational power years on my laptop.

I found 2 things they could have done to help Alex:. Aristocrat MK IV cabinets were developed on a bit ARM processor. If the slot developers decided to also use a bit random number seed, then there are just 4,,, possible RNG states.

It may look like a lot, but current computers are very fast and this number of options can easily be examined by brute force takes 4 seconds on my laptop.

However, I consider this option less likely. How do you use a bit number to deterministically stop 5 reels by 50 symbols each?

The easiest approach which preserves uniformity would be the following:. Each reel now uses its part of a random number, and there are no correlations among the individual reels.

Regulator approves. With the advent of advanced technology — scams have become even more difficult to expose. With the introduction of new technologies in casinos , such as electronic roulettes and various slot machines — the set-up and fraud by players were less and less.

In general, such attempts failed. Attempts at fraud were mostly made at tables where card games were played.

Players would generally track or count cards — and thus try to get money. Rarely did anyone dare to take action and cheat the slot machine. There are few examples, or at least they are not known to the public — that someone managed to cheat the slot machine.

As we said at the beginning — every pain has its cure. So the way to cheat the slot machine is not impossible to find. You already know that no lock cannot be unlocked.

So it is with slot machines. We will try to give you a few examples and reveal some of the successful scams on slot machines.

According to Slots O Rama — there is not much information about this that we know about today — some examples are still known. How have these scams changed the world of dice and is man smarter than a machine?

Here are some examples where this has proven possible. In the past, when slot machines were played the old-fashioned way by pulling the handle, scams were not so common.

However, with the advent of new technologies, the space for manipulation has opened up on both sides — both for casinos and for players. Numerous hardware manipulations are known to be used by players in an attempt to defraud the casino and take home the much-desired money.