How To Cheat Slot Machines In Casinos
There is something of an ongoing battle between the manufacturers and designers of slot machines and those people who make a career out of cheating them, and in a change from our usual slot playing guides and slot playing articles we are going to take a look at how people have, over the years, managed to cheat, defraud and scam slot machines found on casino floors across the globe.
We would like to point out that the following information and ways of cheating slot machines is provided for information purposes only and we do not condone cheating slot machines, in fact if you try and cheat a slot you are likely to be spotted more or less instantly by the security systems in place in all land based casinos and will find yourself on the wrong side of the law.
Coin Based Slot Cheats
Slot Machine Tricks And Cheats
There have been many coin based slot cheating methods over the years, some of them quite basic methods such as using counterfeit coins, in fact when the older styled coin mechanisms were attached to slot machines it was quite common for people to make lead based coins which due to them being non magnetic would simply glide through the coin mechanism and register credits.
There were also a few people who actually made counterfeit coins using ice moulds of the coins and would place the ice based coins into the coin mechanisms, get credits awarded, play off those credits and they would collect any winnings that spun in.
Probably one of the most popular methods of cheating at slots was a top-bottom joint, a unique tool made of two parts. On the top it has a metal rod with a long wire at the bottom. That long wire was put inside the slot machine coin chute, whereas the metal rod was used to go through the coin slot. Flashing a “Light Wand” to Fool the Machine’s Payout Sensor and Triggering a Jackpot. How to hack a slot machine at a casinoPagoda of fortune slot machine it falls how to hack a slot machine at a casino into the category of “that explains a lot,” but still, casino credit.
The beauty of this method of cheating slot machines was that by the time the casino staff emptied the cash boxes of the slot machines the ice would have melted and the water would have evaporated therefore leaving no trace of the counterfeit coins.
Another coin based slot cheating method was to attach a coin to a piece of wire, the most commonly used wire was the type that is used by a grass strimming machine which is a non magnetic plastic type of wire, with some skill a cheat could insert the coin past the coin mechanism security features, register credits, then pout the coin back out and repeat the process, this method of cheating the coin mechanism could and did register a lot of credits in a very short amount of time.
However, over the years casino operators and the slot machine designers have now designed some of the most advanced coin mechanisms ever seen, and all of the above ways of cheating the coin mechanisms are now obsolete.
Hopper and Coin Tube Cheats
Inside a slot machine you will find either a set of payout tubes or something known as a coin hopper. The older styles gaming machines have a set of coin tubes, and as coins are fed into the coin slot they first pass over the coin tube and fill it up, any surplus coins then pass over the top of the filled coin tube and go straight into the coin box.
As the base of these coin tubes is a solenoid type of mechanism, and when a player wins the slot machines CPU will send a number of signals to the solenoid which are turned into pulses, the solenoid is connected to small plungers and for each pulse sent the plunger pushes one coin at a time out of the tube to pay the player his or her winnings.
This was a fairly fool proof system for paying winners, however it didn’t take long for slot cheats to devise a way of defrauding these coin tubes, and how they would do it was by drilling a small hole in the wooden casing of the slot machine, with a small cordless drill or some other such device and then by inserting a small screwdriver into the hole they could manually manipulate the solenoid and plunger therefore emptying the slot machine of all its coins in a few second.
After this scam was discovered the slot machine manufacturers designed a new way of paying out winners, and this was by using a hopper system. A hopper is basically a bucket type of device which spins around much like a cement mixer does.
As the hopper rotates, a coin chute which is attached at the side of the hopper will allow one coin at a time to move down the chute, and at the top of this chute is a censor, if a player wins the hopper would rotate and the required number of coins would be paid out via the chute with the censor counting each coin paid out and the hopper would then stop rotating once the required number of coins to pay the winner had passed through the sensor.
This system of paying out coins from a hopper worked seamlessly for many years, but a scam was soon discovered which cost the slot machine industry millions, and this was something known as a light wand.
This was a ingenuous device which was basically a small LED light attached to a piece of wire, which was fed up through the coin payout chute and with a bit of skill a slot machine cheat could get the LED to the position on the hoppers coin chute so that when a winning payout was being paid out that cheat could then illumine the LED which was connected via the wire to a small battery and that would then blind the censor.
This had the effect of rendering the hoppers coin censor useless and the hopper would simply spin and spin thinking it was not dispensing coins due to the LED following the coin censor, in a very short period of time the coin hopper could be completely emptied by a slot machine cheat and he or she would leave no physical signs that the machine has been defrauded.
This cheat was eventually eradicated by a new design of the hopper and coin senor, however there are always people prepared to spend as much time as is necessary devising ways to cheat slot machines and as such the list of ways to cheats slots is always going to get bigger and bigger.