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Casino Surveillance: Theft Prevention

Casinos nationwide are recognizing that a major threat to their profitability is thieving employees. Statistics compiled by the Nevada Gaming Commission indicate that during the period 1999-2000, approximately 34 percent of those arrested for theft or cheating in casinos were the casinos' own staff members.

Employees who commit internal theft often are driven by the need to pay for high personal debt, a lifestyle that exceeds income, or drug or alcohol abuse. They may rationalize their actions as legitimate in the light of perceived slights, such as being passed over for promotion.

To deter employee theft, many casinos are instituting internal control policies that are verified by regular casino surveillance audits. Some casinos with adequate staff are also training designated personnel to form permanent casino surveillance and auditing teams.

Proper internal controls let casinos operate efficiently while allowing investigative personnel to detect theft, fraud, or other abuses in each segment of the casino property. Locations that require attention include the casino and cage, gift shop, hotel, ticket sales office, snack bars, restaurants, and lounges. Once control procedures are in place, audits should occur both randomly and regularly, as well as when suspicious activity is reported on a casino's anonymous theft hot line. Audits should also he triggered when financial tallies, such as monthly costs of sales, fluctuate.

At Las Vegas's Stratosphere Tower, where Derk J. Boss, CPP (one of the coauthors of this article), is director of surveillance, two investigators are assigned as a permanent audit team to monitor employees' transactions and verify that procedures are followed. In the six months after the team began its work, it found either willful or accidental procedural errors during almost every audit it conducted.

On the floor. Each area of the casino floor where games are played is prone to its own types of fraud. When auditing, investigators watch employee transactions for "tells," which hint at crime in that particular environment. One kind of tell that personnel make is a conscious or unconscious gesture or movement. For instance, one indicator is "rubbernecking," looking to the left or right while working to determine whether anyone is watching.

The casino surveillance team also looks for gestures that employees fail to make. Surveillance personnel closely watch the hand movements of dealers on the casino floor. For example, if a dealer leaves a table after handling the chips, he or she must clap and turn empty palms toward the ceiling's CCTV cameras. At one facility, a casino surveillance officer saw a blackjack dealer straighten the chips and then leave the table without making the proper gestures. A live audit was initiated, as well as a review of recent CCTV surveillance tapes. They revealed that the dealer had previously stolen from the gaming table on at least two occasions.

While clapping and showing empty hands are arcane gestures to onlookers, they are the signs of procedural compliance that casino surveillance operators look for. Another of these occurs when a dealer accepts a tip from a patron. These tips usually take the form of chips. When one is received, the dealer is supposed to rap the chip on the table and then drop it into his or her tip box. Not doing so is a cue to casino surveillance that an audit on the dealer should be initiated.

Yet another tell is improper dealing. In a hand-held game, dealers must hold the cards at a 45-degree angle so that they cannot be seen as they come off the deck. Dealers must also disperse the cards so that they remain flat, with no way for players to glimpse beneath.

If a casino surveillance officer spots nonprocedural dealing, an in-house investigation begins to determine whether the dealer's behavior is accidental or intentional. Investigators will monitor the dealer's games live and review tapes of past play until they reach a conclusion. If the investigators' verdict is cheating or theft, agents of the state gaming control board will be called in to make an arrest. If the verdict is simple dealer error, the employee's shift manager will be informed. A warning may be issued or the dealer may be retrained, if necessary. In either case, the investigators will document the audit and include the corrective action taken.

Player ratings. Almost aft casinos issue a player's club card to patrons who gamble for any length of time. The more a patron plays, the more points he or she garners. The points are redeemable for meals, shows, hotel rooms, gifts, and other complimentary items meant to draw the player back to the casino. Casino floor personnel assign points after tracking the player's average bet amount, time spent at a game, and other factors. These points are written on cards that are given to a pit clerk for computer entry.

The creation of accounts for imaginary players is a frequently encountered employee scheme. At one casino, there have also been repeated problems with floor personnel falsifying ratings to earn comps for relatives and others. So often has this abuse occurred that in the casino surveillance department it is jokingly referred to as the "friends and family plan." One floor person, for instance, was suspected of falsely boosting the points in her father's account. A casino surveillance audit caught her writing up large amounts of time that her father had played when, in fact, he had not been in the casino at all. To counter the abuse, casino surveillance implemented more frequent random and regular audits of player ratings.

When a question is raised but it is not clear that fraud is occurring, the auditors review CCTV footage and compare the times and bet amounts on tape with those noted on the floor person's handwritten cards. The inexact method of rating players means that it is acceptable for there to be small variations--up to ten minutes or so. However, a discrepancy of a half-hour begins to add unearned points to a player's account. It is up to the investigators to determine whether the discrepancies are human inexactitude, procedural error that can be rectified by more training, or fraud.

Another area that is constantly watched by casino surveillance and frequently audited is the casino cage. Employees there also practice procedures for the camera, such as clapping and showing hands, as well as laying out chips to be redeemed or money paid out to a winning player so that casino surveillance officers can actually count the value. While the layout varies from casino to casino, typically the cashier begins on the left and moves right, stacking chips or counting out piles of bills of the same denomination.

Any indication that the employee is not following these procedures is a sign of trouble. Other tells include odd body positions.

Staff crime is also common in all casino retail point-of-sale (POS) environments, including bars and lounges, gift shops, ticket sales counters, and hotel registration.

For instance, to encourage guests to feed the slot machines, casinos normally provide free drinks for extended play. The bartender is usually trusted to dispense these complimentary drinks. A dishonest bartender can easily enter a comp transaction into the register when he or she makes a sale to a nonplayer who paid for a drink. The cash is then set aside for later retrieval by the bartender.

There is one classic tell for this kind of theft. To retrieve the correct amount from the till, thieving employees must keep a mental total of the overage they have accumulated. Many keep this tally symbolically by using items such as cocktail straws and pennies. When casino surveillance sees a cashier rubbernecking and then placing small objects into piles beneath the countertop, in a drawer, or in other places, investigators are notified.

In the audit, casino surveillance investigators compare videotape of the drinks served to the guests at the bar to the register transaction report. Many casinos are also installing integrated, real-time POS systems that show all the cash register details on a monitor in addition to video coverage.

Unfortunately, many casinos with surveillance auditing programs conduct them infrequently; worse, some do not audit at all. The financial losses can be significant.

Casino Surveillance Technology: Casinos have used facial recognition technology for years as part of their never-ending quest to identify and catch cheaters.

Three of Atlantic City's 12 casinos use facial recognition software as part of their casino surveillance units.

In one top casino's surveillance room, operators use a keypad at their work stations to aim a concealed overhead casino surveillance camera at a blackjack player.

This advanced casino surveillance technology is likely to spread, even though civil liberties experts call it intrusive.

Law enforcement officials defend the use of intelligent facial recognition casino surveillance technology by saying that it's similar to what American consumers are subjected to in banks, stores, apartment buildings and some public places.

The system is known as biometrics . It focuses on the eyes and translates the image of a face into a numerical code that is then compared against other faces.

When used in conjunction with regular casino surveillance cameras and databases on cheaters, the system can quickly recognize a known cheater, outline his modus operandi and call up photographs of associates or co-conspirators -- all in a matter of seconds.

The photographs are provided by law enforcement agencies, other casino surveillance teams, companies that sell databases on cheaters and the casino's own records.

Quick and efficient, facial recognition software brings casino surveillance into the 21st century. The average casino is very unsophisticated. They have a few VCRs, some 15-inch [TV] monitors and some mug shot books. In this low-tech casino surveillance environment, cheaters often succeed and remain anonymous. But the new high tech facial recognition casino surveillance systems are making cheating much more difficult.

Civil Liberties groups say the use of facial recognition for casino surveillance is an invasion of privacy but not a civil liberties issue because it is being used in a public place. What's more, casino surveillance personnel defend the systems as only being used to identify crooks. Honest people, they say, have nothing to worry about.

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