Four Chinese scammers are under arrest after their plot to fleece a poker-playing pigeon was rumbled.
On Sept. 23, a small business owner named Feng contacted police based on his suspicions that he’d been the victim of con men posing as fellow poker players. Feng claimed to have been drugged by the men before engaging in a marathon poker session in a hotel room in Dali, Yunnan province.
Police subsequently raided the hotel room, detaining the four suspects along with the tools of their trade: 30 packs of marked cards and a pair of specially designed contact lenses that allowed their wearer to identify the value of the cards via their markings on the back.
According to local media outlet Yunnan.cn, the suspects admitted their guilt, explaining that the individual who wore the contact lenses would use hand signals to tip off his three co-conspirators as to what cards Feng was holding.
But the suspects were too eager to win Feng’s money, not even trying to disguise their chicanery by allowing Feng to win now and then. The police report claimed Feng lost every single hand he played with the four cheats.
Feng said the poker players had taken him for RMB 10k (US $1,500) in cash and a further RMB 60k via a promissory note. Feng might not have to honor that IOU but he’s not getting his cash back, as the police ended up charging him with illegal gambling, as there’s no such thing as legal gambling on the Chinese mainland.
The use of illegal optical aids is neither new nor confined to China. In 2013, a gambler was detained at Connecticut’s Mohegan Sun casino after security caught him marking cards with an “ink-like substance” that could be detected by his infrared contacts.
That same year, a French court sentenced a group of Italian poker players to lengthy prison stints for cheating Cannes casino Les Princes out of €100k in a scam that involved the participation of a casino dealer. Ironically, those scammers said they’d purchased their special contacts from a Chinese supplier.
