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Fake Casino Chips Cause Mass Freak Out

The discovery of counterfeit casino chips found in circulation at the Crown Casino in Melbourne, Australia, all but turned the casino’s gaming floor upside down for several hours as casino management hustled to sort out the problem and remove the fake tokens. The trouble started this week when a thousand (Australian) dollar chip was recovered and found to be a fake. The scare prompted Crown Casino officials to take inventory and individually examine some thirteen thousand seven hundred chips – worth over thirteen and a half million dollars – to check for more ringers. So far, they have recovered at least thirty-six thousand dollars in fake thousand dollar chips. The scale of the fraud is one of the biggest that the casino has seen in recent years.

One interesting aspect of the story is that the fake chips were of very poor quality. Crown Casino representative Gary O’Neill called the integrity of the bogus chips “laughable,” and notes that the house would have undoubtedly identified the chips immediately, had they cycled through a cashier. It appears that Crown Casino has contained the fraud, and that it didn’t last any longer than one day. O’Neill confirms that the casino has changed the look of their chips, however. It is still unknown how the chips entered circulation, and whether they were actually passed off as real at any point for cash.

Counterfeiting of chips and tokens is a major problem for slot machine and casino gambling locations. As modern technology improves by leaps and bounds, the methods available for criminals to create better forgeries are also advancing.

Back to April 2009 Archive.