Slashdot Log In
Slot Machine with Bad Software Sends Players To Jail
Posted by
Zonk
on Fri Jul 20, 2007 03:22 PM
from the can't-you-see-the-code dept.
from the can't-you-see-the-code dept.
dcollins writes "Previous discussions here have turned into debates over who is liable for faulty software: the programmers, the publisher, etc. Yahoo has a new option: perhaps the users are criminally liable for using the software. From the AP: 'Prosecutors are considering criminal charges against casino gamblers who won big on a slot machine that had been installed with faulty software ... A decision on whether to bring criminal charges could come in a couple of weeks, said John Colin, chief deputy prosecutor for Harrison County. He said 'criminal intent' may be involved when people play a machine they know is faulty.' Would your average user be able to distinguish 'faulty software' from 'lucky'?"
Related Stories
[+]
News: Our ATM Is Broken, Go To Jail 575 comments
Actually, I do RTFA writes "This community recently discussed possible criminal prosecution for people who took advantage of faulty slot machine software. At the time, many here drew an analogy to a hypothetical ATM that dispensed too much money. Well, apparently, that too may result in criminal charges. Although they suspect that someone may have tampered with the ATM, they are considering charging anyone who got extra money from it." Here is an editorial musing on the morality of such unexpected windfalls.
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Full
Abbreviated
Hidden
Loading... please wait.
Good grief (Score:4, Insightful)
If you put $1 in the machine and got a $10 credit, I should think that the user would figure out that there's more going on than them just being "lucky".
As TFA says, the Casino contacted the winners about the fault, and several of them agreed to give back their winnings. (Total losses for the casino were nearly $500,000.) Criminal charges are being considered for the remainder of the two dozen people who exploited the machine. Those charges would result in the gambler getting hauled before a judge and made to prove that he thought that he was just "lucky" when the machine gave him a $10 credit for every $1 he put in.
Re:Good grief (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Good grief (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Good grief (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree. This was the one point that really stood out in the article to me.
As long as you are not breaking any rules of the game, not cheating, they should not be able to prosecute you. If a person was operating the machine per instructions, insert coin/token, pull handle/push button, no matter what they did, they cannot be held accountable for any crime. If you operate the machine as described, you have a chance of it giving you more money. You intend to try to increase your money on these machines, and if operating it by the rules, there is no crime.
This should be treated much like counting cards at blackjack. If you do it in your head with no mechanical help, you are playing within the rules, and you are not cheating. The casino (except in Atlantic city I think) can tell you they'd not like to take your action anymore, and can even throw you out and not let you gamble there any longer, but, you cannot be charged with a crime. If you play by the rules they give you, you cannot be held criminal.
Parent
Re:Good grief (Score:5, Insightful)
The whole point of the article is that, apparently, you can.
Parent
Re:Good grief (Score:5, Informative)
Gambling machines are highly regulated in the states where they are operated. The machine processors are checked by the state and held under lock, key, and surveillance until installed in the machines which are also under lock, key, and surveillance. The people who service the machines are certified by the state. Those employees fill out about an inch of paperwork when they are hired in order for their state and federal background checks, which includes taking and running their fingerprints through the criminal databases. Cheating and allegations of cheating are taken very seriously by the states and the feds in this business, which at one point was run by the mob. The machines do not cheat.
That said, those machines are programmed to benefit the casino, which is not the same as cheating. The casino actually sets the payout amount to a certain percentage of every dollar, in accordance with state law. For example, machines that bring in little money for the casinos, such as penny slots, generally have the worst payout to the player. For penny slots, that payout could be $0.85 for every $1. For more profitable slots, such as $5 slots, that payout ratio could be $0.97 for every $1.
The payout ratio depends on the casino and what they want to do. If they want to attract customers, then they increase the payouts. If they have a good amount of customers, then they'll decrease the payouts to increase profits. Customers are very sensitive to these payout amounts. If players sense a casino is being cheap, aka "the slots are tight", then players will leave that casino. If the players sense a casino is giving money away, aka "the slots are loose", then those players will get out the word and people will flock to that casino. It's all supply and demand.
Parent
Re: like the ballot boxes, right? (Score:5, Insightful)
It is far easier to cheat a voting machine than a slot machine, which demonstrates the sorry priorities of our current society.
Parent
Re:Good grief (Score:4, Interesting)
For every 1000 pulls:
1x 500-point payout
2x 100-point payouts
6x 25-point payouts
12x 10-point payouts
Total payouts: 970 points
Multiply the point totals by the dollar or cent amount of the slot machine and you have monetary totals.
Parent
Re:Good grief (Score:5, Informative)
As far as I understood it, all the slot machines would be programmed for a 95-98% pay back to the player, but there would always be one or two in a casino that is programmed to a 105% payback. The higher pay machine would always be changed so that if you went back for you "lucky" machine, you might not get it.
Nasty. That's why I didn't take the job.
Parent
Re:Good grief (Score:5, Informative)
The issue of whether or not card counting constitutes cheating was and is a hot topic in the gaming industry with strong opinions on both sides of the issue. The courts have consistently ruled that it is not cheating, from the legal definition of cheating (i.e. the one that results in a criminal prosecution), to count cards provided that one is not assisted in this endeavor by any sort of device (i.e. mechanical, electronic, electro-mechanical, etc). The casinos on the other hand, not surprisingly, consider all forms of card counting, even the type that courts have ruled legal as "intelligent play" (i.e. using your brain), as "cheating". This is where it gets interesting. In Las Vegas the casinos have the right to refuse service to anyone for any reason and it is not unheard of for card counters to get the back-room treatment (i.e. casino security goons try to verbally intimidate you into not coming back again and in the old days that did more than just talk if you know what I mean). However in Atlantic City they are not allowed to refuse someone a game, provided that the casino is open to the public and the player is not creating an overt disturbance, so they do things like switch decks frequently, deal from multiple decks, deal only partway through the decks, use automatic shufflers, etc...to discourage card counting.
The gaming industry is not a nice industry to be in, either as a player or an owner, being classically considered as a vice industry which means that you are going to attract many of the "wrong sort of people" if you know what I mean. The casinos deal harshly with anyone they perceive to be hurting the bottom line precisely because the entire atmosphere of gambling is already highly adversarial and involves the one thing that everyone wants more of...money...and lots of it. Personally, I don't much care for gambling, even as a form of entertainment, but if you plan to try card counting then all I can say is watch out...either you wont be any good at it and the casinos will encourage you to "count" more often or you will be in which case you will end up in their database and be bared from just about every casino on the face of the earth.
Parent
Re:Good grief (Score:5, Interesting)
Having some exposure to the gaming industry, ex-wife is professional poker dealer (just dealt the final table WSOP), and being a card counter myself, I have noticed that casinos, at least in small gambling communities, prefer card counters.
First of all, the courts have stated that casinos can only offer games of chance. If a casino wants to outlaw counting cards on the basis that card-counting pays the player, then, by definition, blackjack is not a game of chance and therefore cannot be offered by a casino.
Back to the point. Most blackjack players, quite frankly, suck, but think they are wizards. Every now and again, a good player walks into a casino, counts cards, tips well and keeps winning. What happens next? All of the gamblers walking by the table notice how "hot" the table is, sit down, and promptly empty their wallet.
One good, polite, well-tipping card counter will advertise the table, pay the dealers well and fill the house's coffers, while not costing the house much to pay the card counter.
More than one pit boss has approached me and asked how I was counting, and then asked if there was anything they could do for me -- food, drinks, etc.
Parent
Re:Good grief (Score:4, Insightful)
If you run a casino, you deserve far worse. Being shot up with crack and watching your new addiction ruin your life would be about right. Merely losing some money from the same scheme you try on others... justice.
Parent
Re:Good grief (Score:5, Insightful)
Put a dollar into a penny slot and you'll get 100 credits for every dollar. Put a dollar into a nickel slot and you'll get 20 credits. A slot player may or may not notice the discrepancy between the dollars they put in and the amount of credits they receive. And even if those players do notice the discrepancy, they may attribute that to the signage on the machine being incorrect, thinking that the dollar machine really is a dime machine.
If players actually knew about this malfunction, you would see customers walking away with million dollar checks. The casinos would or should have been tipped off that something was wrong far earlier in those circumstances.
Don't attribute to maliciousness what you can attribute to stupidity.
If you can justify borderline illegal and illegal activity for any reason you will end up with lots of people breaking the law.
You're assuming that these players have done something illegal or "borderline" illegal, whatever that means. The last time I checked, unless an action is specifically deemed illegal, then it is perfectly legal to perform that action.
The fact is that the machine manufacturer produced these machines, the state and feds authorized these machines, the casinos willingly put these machines online for play, customers payed money to play them, and the machines payed out. Yes, there may have been a malfunction and malfunctions void all pays and plays, however the casino did not catch that malfunction, started the machine, and took player money for some time with those malfunctioning machines.
Hunting down innocent players after weeks or months went by, telling them that their slot machine was malfunctioning, telling them that they were not entitled to the money they won, and then demanding that money back sounds more like the real thievery going on. In fact, it sounds very similar to extortion. If the machine was malfunctioning, it should have been turned off and it should not have accepted that money in the first place. The casino, the state, the feds, or the machine manufacturer put this malfunctioning machine into play without properly checking it and thus one of those entities are financially responsible for that machine, not the players.
The fault here lies with sloppy auditing or maintenance, which is not the player's fault.
Parent
Re:Good grief (Score:5, Informative)
Most probability studies assume that the random-number generating mechanism has no memory. This is usually correct. Throwing six sixes with a die does not alter the probability of throwing a six next time: it's still 1/6. But when playing 21, there is a sort of memory effect going on; because cards that have already fallen will not show up again. And it's upon precisely this memory that the card-counter relies. Once KS has been drawn, the probability of the next card being KS is zero. If you have an infinite number of decks (equivalent to returning each card to a random position within the deck after use), the probability of any random card being the KS is always 1/52. With a finite number of decks, the memory effect is reduced as compared to a single deck but not eliminated altogether.
You can memorise the order of a single deck, but that's not the way most people do it. The "classic" method is mentally to divide the card ranks into "high" (8-K, likely to bust you whatever you've got), "low" (A-3, good for completing a five-card trick) and "middling" (4-7). Now you know in any deck there are 24 high cards, 12 low cards and 16 middling cards. By knowing how many cards within each band have fallen, you can determine how likely you are to get a card you want. If, say, a bunch of high cards come up, it's not unreasonable -- because of the memory effect -- to expect the next card to be low or middling. And you can bet accordingly; low when the cards don't favour you (or when they favour the dealer), high when they do (or the dealer stands a good chance of being busted on the next card).
The only way to disrupt card-counting (unless you have an infinitely large casino with room for an infinite number of cards; but then, you'd have no room for any players to sit at the card table -- even if you had an infinite number of seats, they would all be full of nothing but stacks of cards) is to return each card to the deck immediately it has been played, and always draw each card from a random position (or shuffle between each deal).
Parent
Re:Good grief (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re:Good grief (Score:5, Informative)
I work in a casino repairing slot machines at the moment, and yes, if a machine jams, the patron DOES get their money back. The casino by law cannot pick up change off the floor nor can they keep any money that was put into a machine but the machine didnt register. The patron will always get their money back after an investigation is completed and it is determined that the money really does belong to the patron.
Parent
Re:Good grief (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re:Good grief (Score:5, Interesting)
In fact, I believe they do this on purpose as a psychological trick - you're losing points, you're not losing real money...
Parent
Re:Good grief (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Mixed feelings (Score:5, Interesting)
I have mixed feelings about this.
On the one hand, the casino should bear at least some of the responsibility for allowing a faulty machine to give away its money. I think it's entirely reasonable to expect them to inspect equipment for such glaring problems before installing it and letting the public have at it.
On the other hand, if a slot machine has the fact that it costs one dollar to play prominently displayed, and you get ten dollars' worth of credit when you insert your dollar, it's painfully obvious to any reasonable person that the machine is messed up. The people playing most certainly should have reported the error, or at the very least, not exploited it.
At the very least, I think the casino would--and should--have a very strong civil case against the people who exploited the bug and who didn't return the money. If the opposite happened, that people only got one dollar's worth of credit when they inserted a ten-dollar bill, you'd better believe there would have been hell to pay, and maybe even a lawsuit over it. Just because the error is in favor of the customer instead of the company doesn't shift the morality of the issue. As a matter of public relations, though, it might be in the casino's best interest not to push the issue, or to push the issue with the people who programmed the slots incorrectly instead of their paying customers.
As for criminal charges, although I think that exploiting the machines is a pretty scummy thing to do, I have a hard time thinking it should be escalated to the level of a crime. Like I said, the casino should bear some responsibility for the mistake. Even if exploiting the machine should be considered some sort of theft or cheating, what happened could be considered enticement to commit a crime that one wouldn't otherwise normally commit. That's entrapment, and that is illegal itself.
Parent
Re:Mixed feelings (Score:5, Insightful)
What makes it so reasonable to believe that the 'error' was really by design is the level of micromanagement that goes on at a typical casino. First the state is involved with highly stringent verification and validation of all electronic games of chance. Then there is the level of observation that goes on - cameras all over the place watching everybody. Then there the actual people on the floor watching everything - keeping track of who wins and who loses, deciding who to comp with free drinks, free rooms, etc.
Given all that, the chance of a broken machine lasting very long on the floor is so small that it is entirely reasonable to expect that it would be the last thing someone might expect when faced with the described behaviour. This is certainly the first time I've ever heard of such an event, despite there being hundreds of thousands of such machines in use for decades now.
Parent
Re:Mixed feelings (Score:4, Insightful)
This is just passing the buck. Clearly someone at the casino was negligent in not fully testing the machines (not even basically testing them, if my understanding of the defect is correct) before placing them on the floor. That is were the fault lies, not with the users.
Parent
Re:Mixed feelings (Score:5, Interesting)
Who said anything about the power to change the software? If you know the software is working incorrectly (which you do, if you get $10 credit for inserting $1), and you use that fact to exploit the machine for your financial gain at the expense of the casino, then you do bear responsibility for their loss.
Think of it this way. If you walk up to an ATM and withdraw $100, and it says on your receipt that your account has been reduced by $100, but the machine actually spit out $1,000, what do you do?
A. Report to the bank that their machine is screwed up and give them back the $900.
B. Keep the whole $1,000 and go your merry way.
C. Insert your card again and take $1,000 at a time until either your account or the ATM is empty.
Option A is clearly the right answer. If you pick option B, the bank will probably drop the issue if you give back the $900. If you choose option C, which is effectively what the people did in the casino, then it's pretty likely you'll find your ass in jail for theft, which is exactly where it should be.
Parent
Re:Mixed feelings (Score:5, Interesting)
At the beginning of the school term I was usually dead broke. I would get my paycheck, put it into the ATM and then immediately withdraw the money ('cause I needed it for rent or tuition or something frivolous like that). When they put a hold on my check, the balance would never go below 0. And when they put the money back in, they would always deposit the whole amount.
So if I had $5.27 in my account (not unusual at the time
This actually happened to me frequently (I was always short of cash and since I was busy I always used the ATM to deposit my checks). Every time it happened I would go with my receipts and attempt to return the money. Every time they would say, "No, you are mistaken. Everything is fine".
This went on for 3 years. And finally they seemed to fix their bug. I have no idea how much money I ended up with, but it's not an exaggeration to say that the bank pretty much paid for my schooling.
I have to assume that since I presented the bank with my receipts that they knew about the problem and were just trying to do damage control by convincing me the problem didn't exist. So somewhere out there is a hugely dysfunctional software team, who took 3 years to fix a blatantly obvious bug. Whoever you are, I seriously owe you some beer
Parent
Re:Mixed feelings (Score:5, Insightful)
ATMs are meant to be easy to use. Clear. Straight forward. Also, you know that when you ask for $40, you get $40 or an error (such as insufficient funds or the machine can't dispense money right now, etc.)
Slot machines look nothing like ATMs. They have flashing lights. They are intentionally confusing. It is unlikely that the user would even detect the kind of error described in the article in a slot machine. You are using the machine in the hope that you get more out of it than you put in.
When I refill my Metro card (NYC subway) I have the option to get more credit than I am actually paying for. For example, if you put in $20, it will give you $24 worth of credit. This is a bonus for spending more at once. I would have a hard time not thinking that the casino was doing something analogous.
I have a hard time having any sympathy for the casino in this situation. The amount of their loss was tiny. People play games at a casino to win money. With this case, if you do somehow, against the odds, manage to win money, the casino can just ask for it back claiming there was an error.
So, it takes away any incentive to gamble. Which is OK with me, because I don't gamble and I think gambling ought to be illegal, period.
Parent
Re:Mixed feelings (Score:4, Informative)
You misunderstand. Its not just that they got 10x the plays as they should have. What it was is that if you put money in, it registers as 10x the amount. So they would put a dollar in, then cash out and get $10 out, then they'd take that $10 and put it back in, it would register as $100, and they'd cash out their $100. Then they'd put their $100 in, it would register as $1,000, and they'd cash it out. And you think that's reasonable? They never even used the slot machine.
Ignore the fact that its a slot machine. Lets pretend its some vending machine full of chips. You put $1, and it says "$10" up top. So you hit "coin return" and it spits out $10 worth of change. So you realize this is awesome, and put that $10 back in and hit the coin return to get even more money, and you keep going until its empty of all its change. That's perfectly reasonable? You had no nefarious intent, and thought it was functioning as intended.
Parent
Yes and no. (Score:4, Interesting)
Think about it this way. In a bookstore or grocery the company is negligent if they put the wrong price on something and then let it be sold as such. However obtaining items under such situations do not result in criminal prosecutions. All that a Casino gives is the chance to win more than you pay, albeit a carefully rigged chance that is not in your favor. In this case they screwed up and gave too much of a chance. The fault here should lie with the Casino not the players. It was internal negligence not external. Proving a crime on the players' part seems a little odd of an interpretation to me.
Parent
Re:Good grief (Score:5, Insightful)
I wouldn't. When I've walked through vegas casinos some of those games look pretty freagin complicated and I wouldn't think anything of it if I got $10 credits for $1, especially with all the stupid lights and bells going off all around me. I'd probably figure there was a ratio of "game dollars" to real dollars, or something like when you put a quarter in a video game and it says "1/3" credit (because the game costs 75 cents). Why not 1/4 credit for a quarter? I wouldn't think anything of it I'd just stick some money in and play the game for a bit, and consider myself lucky if I came out with more $$ than I started. Big deal.
Also consider the fact that this was, according to TFA, a foreign machine that did not recognize dollars (anyone actually believe that?). Well if that were really the case that they couldn't even get the currency right, then I'd expect a the on-screen instructions to be poorly translated at best. It might be showing the wrong currency symbol entirely. Who knows.
One thing's for sure though: if these casinos are dumb enough to start suing their customers or trying to put them in jail, it's not going to entice a whole lot of people to take a trip to vegas... look at how well that plan worked for the music industry.
Parent
Re:Good grief (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Lucky (Score:5, Funny)
I know blackjack is faulty and will abuse it (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
(They really do still work cheaters over in the back room..)
A "simple set of rules"?... (Score:5, Interesting)
Blackjack is a winnable game, but it is not "a simple set of rules" that will do it.
The rules you're referring to are called "Basic Strategy," which is a set of rules that will maximize your odds of winning in any given situation. All casinos I've ever been in allow you to actually keep Basic Strategy notes with you for reference. I've even seen them sold on cards in the gift shops of some casinos.
However, this set of rules will not give you an edge over the casino. All it does is lower the casino's edge over you.
The rules that will win at blackjack depend on counting cards. You have to keep track in your head of what's been played, at least in general terms of high cards vs. low cards. As low cards are played out of a shoe, the odds of the player winning go up, because high cards tend to bust dealer hands. The key is to bet more money when the shoe has a disproportionate number of high cards in it, and to bet less when the shoe has a normal distribution or when the shoe has a disproportionate number of low cards in it.
In some places such as Las Vegas, casinos have the legal right to bar players they suspect of counting cards. In others such as Atlantic City, they don't. In those places, casinos compensate by having dealers at tables with card counters shuffle the shoes much more often, sometimes after every single hand. By doing so, any advantage a card counter may have is negated, and the odds will always be in favor of the casino.
Obviously, pit bosses and security personnel in casinos are trained to spot card counters. The casino has computers itself that can analyze the odds of the player and casino at any point in a shoe, and if they see players vary their bets according to where those odds lie, they know they've got a counter on their hands and can ban them. Casinos have also been known to hire card counters to watch for betting variations of other counters and report them. Also, casinos maintain databases of known card counters so that professionals are instantly spotted and never even get a chance to play in their own favor.
But the set of rules to be a counter is not simple. In fact, most casinos actually LIKE it when people who think they can count cards come. The thing is, if you screw it up, you will lose a lot of money, because you'll be betting large amounts when the odds are not in your favor. Casinos get far more money from people who screw up card counting than they lose to people who can actually pull it off. For one thing, you're having to keep running counts of at least two numbers (more, if you want better odds) in your head. For another, you're actually having to play the game, and the guy sitting beside you at the table doesn't want to wait 30 seconds for you to decide whether to hit or stand after every card. For another, when you're trying to count cards, you're typically trying to do it in some non-obvious way so that if you're successful, you won't be banned or shuffled up on. It's hard to act all casual like you're not intensely concentrating on something when in reality you are. For yet another, casinos are by their nature very distracting places, with lots of commotion, yelling, dinging slot machines, and so on. As if that weren't enough, while you're at the tables, you'll have waitresses who are generally very attractive coming by repeatedly offering you free drinks, and counting cards while drunk is infinitely harder than counting them while sober.
Parent
State's Fault? (Score:4, Informative)
Applies to gas too? (Score:5, Interesting)
Solomon
Re:Applies to gas too? (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Applies to gas too? (Score:4, Interesting)
Possibly. Taking advantage of someone else's screwup can be viewed as an intent to defraud. That being said, the station would be more likely to simply ask you to pay the difference. (Assuming it was a big enough deal to make a stink about, which it probably isn't.)
According to the TFA, that's what the Casino did. They asked people who abused the machine to return the winnings they'd received. Some of them complied. Some of them didn't. Those that didn't are the ones who are being considered for criminal charges. It hasn't been decided yet if the state is going to pursue the case or not.
Parent
Machines not designed for US currency??? (Score:5, Insightful)
If Caesars was so negligent that they put out machines not designed for US currency without testing them or having their vendor test them, then they deserve to lose the money.
I'm just surprised (Score:4, Funny)
Even the editors don't RTFA (Score:4, Interesting)
When all the average Joe had to do was insert a dollar to get back $10 or $20, as in *no* game play at all, that's not "luck", that's "a stupid idiot who thinks he can rip off a casino".
If someone came up to a machine, and stuck a buck in and got back $10 without doing anything *or knowing the situation* and only did it once, I'd say the casino needs to suck it up and eat it.
But when people are lining up and (some of them) shoving $100 in to get $1000 out, that's not "luck" or "the way it goes", that's called "theft". And those who knowingly did it need to be knowingly prosecuted and knowingly be required to knowingly pay the piper.
Whoa, there... (Score:5, Insightful)
Casinos are the rare exception to simple rules like this: anyone caught playing by the rules and winning too much is prosecuted, hence the prohibition against car counting in blackjack, which is simply smart play. They give you sheets to keep track of roulette spins, and will let you make notes on dice throws all day long.
To put it in simpler terms: You cut the cake, your brother chooses which piece. If you're the one cutting the cake, don't get pissed if your brother chooses the bigger half.
Malfunction voids all plays and pays. (Score:5, Interesting)
!sympathy here.
--Yahoo-- is not suing anyone (Score:5, Insightful)
Harrison County, Indiana is the legal entity considering criminal charges against players, probably at the behest of Caesar's.
I find the summary wording to be at least misleading, if not defamatory.
Beyond that, from TFA, the machine was crediting ten dollars for every dollar inserted, not paying out with more wins. It was clearly, demonstrably, and obviously faulty. So the answer to the question "Would your average user be able to distinguish 'faulty software' from 'lucky'?" is yes. They knew damned well they were getting $10 worth of chances for every $1. It was as obvious as finding that someone had left their wallet at the machine and pocketing it.
What the heck is going on here editors? This summary is beyond shoddy.
--
Toro
Casinos win these battles all the time (Score:4, Interesting)
http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/17709 [networkworld.com]
Gaming Practice and Law (Score:5, Informative)
In this case, it doesn't appear as though the bug was inserted by the users, just (sigh) exploited in order to win. These cases are well litigated in Nevada (though probably not in Indiana/Kentucky), and elsewhere. The trend seems to be [gaminglawmasters.com] (Scroll Down to "Overpayment to Patron") that if it can be proven that the gaming patron didn't involve him or herself in the actual flaw of the machine, then not only are they not liable, but the Casino must still pay out the winnings.
That'll teach em to..... (Score:4, Funny)
I suppose if customers didn't even play and cashed out right away they knew and should give it back. Maybe even have to sue a couple. Actual criminal charges is a bit much as thats almost entrapment. I'd ignore anyone that played more than a round or 2 and cashed out as winnings.
Unless it clearly states everything in dollars, very unlikely as the machine didn't even recognize dollars intially!, they need to leave some room for doubt. Lots of games convert to credits. Someone could assume a typo in the price schedule, etc.
Is it illegal? Hmmm. (Score:4, Interesting)
Did they repeatedly use the system or have knowledge of the problem before they put money into the system the first time?
If the answer to either of those two are yes then it's possible it's criminal intent and there's a case.
But allow me to raise another point Two situations arise. A. You go to the grocer's and you give a 5 to the cashier, who in turn gives you back a 20. Do you have to give this money back?
B. You go to an ATM. The ATM gives you a 50 instead of a 20. Do you have to give this money back?
Last I checked the answer is no to those, unless there's some sort of agreement between you and the bank/store which says any mistakes are decided in the store's favor and you must alert them of all mistakes. Which means if the players were playing and didn't realize the mistake, they shouldn't be required to give the money back.
I agree with Kathryn Ford. (Score:5, Insightful)
So my question is this: Imagine that the machine was faulty in the other direction, that it was rigged to never come up with a win, no matter how long you played. Would the casinos go to similar lengths to contact their patrons after the fact and send them reimbursement checks? If not, then I say, screw 'em.
Caesars lost money? (Score:5, Interesting)
Did they really "lose" money or did they just not make as much as they normally would have? Did the machine pay out during this time, or is it that players got to play 10x more per dollar, and therefore Caesars "lost" money?
Re:Intent (Score:4, Insightful)
Any average joe could do that.
Parent