A member of a syndicate that attempted to cheat Singapore’s Resorts World Sentosa and Marina Bay Sands casinos has been sentenced to nearly two years in prison.
In May, Singapore police announced that an international gang of three men and three women had been caught using electronic devices to predict big payouts on both casinos’ slot machines.
On Tuesday, the Straits Times reported that Czech national Rodoslav Skubnik had been sentenced to 22 months after admitting guilt on three charges of attempting to obtain an advantage for himself by cheating at play. The case marked Singapore’s first instance in which smartphone technology had been utilized to obtain such an edge.
According to Skubnik, he and his two Russian accomplices would use their smartphone video cameras to record play on slot machines made by a specific manufacturer. The recorded images would then be uploaded to a server that analyzed and decoded the data, which would then be loaded back onto the cheats’ phones for use in the casinos.
The gang operated under a ‘master’ and ‘player’ arrangement, with the master responsible for analyzing the data and the players responsible for doing the field work in the casinos. The players would receive 10% of the winnings while the master received 5% from each player and the syndicate claimed the rest.
The Russian gang reportedly had utilized the same scam at casinos in Macau, Europe and the United States. Skubnik won nearly $20k playing slots on three separate trips to Singapore casinos. Police say they recovered ill-gotten winnings of around $120k following the gang members’ arrests.
Skubnik’s two Russian accomplices, Vladislav Logachev and Andrei Egorov, have yet to come to trial. If they fail to strike a deal with prosecutors, they could be looking at prison sentences of up to seven years on each charge, plus fines of up to SGD 150k (US $110k).
