Counterfeit poker chips have been popping up in casinos at an increasingly alarming rate these days.
The Borgata Winter Open is still recovering from the fiasco of having counterfeit poker chips in one of its tournaments last month and now, another case of these fake chips have propped up, this time at the Maryland Live! Casino in Hannover, Maryland.
State police told local reporters earlier this week that two individuals have been arrested in connection to allegedly passing fake $100 chips in poker games at the casino last month. Two other suspects remain at-large.
The two suspects that were apprehended have been identified as Rosa A. Nguyen and her husband Vuong Q. Truong. Nguyen was charged with one count of theft between $1,000 and $10,000, and two counts of “conspiracy to commit theft” between $1,000 and $10,000 with Truong getting off a little lighter with accusations of committing a theft scheme and conspiracy to commit theft.
According to the local authorities, over $115,000 in counterfeit casino chips were recovered in Lake Accotink in Springfied, Virginia after the suspects discarded them. Even more disturbing was the lengths by which Nguyen took to make the chips look similar to the chips being used in Maryland Live! Apparently, upon purchasing $150,000 worth of fake chips on the Internet for $12,000, dear old Rosa took the chips and had them altered to look similar to legal chips used in the casino.
The case of the counterfeit chips is an embarrassing episode for Maryland Live!, which just opened its 52-table poker room last August shortly after the state began authorizing table games.
Here’s to hoping these two crooks get dealt with swiftly and effectively, and the two other suspects that are still at-large are apprehended as soon as possible.
