A Crown Resorts casino croupier has been charged with rigging a dice game in order to illegally pay out over $100k to five of his friends.
According to local media reports, the unidentified 20-year-old croupier was detained last October after Crown Melbourne casino security caught on to the scam, which involved improperly paying out on sic bo wagers to five accomplices. The accomplices were also arrested and charged with obtaining property by deception.
Police say the croupier and his accomplices would meet up in a car park at Melbourne University, where the croupier was a student, to divide their ill-gotten gains. The croupier reportedly received 65% of the bogus winnings, while his friends split the rest.
Casinos are on high alert for such internal thefts, which rarely escape the surveillance cameras’ all-seeing eyes for very long. In November, Connecticut’s Mohegan Sun casino accused a blackjack dealer of overpaying customers $78k while the previous month saw the Bellagio in Las Vegas accuse two craps dealers and their accomplices of a $1.5m scam.
Meanwhile, a Turkish gang of three-card poker cheats who scammed London’s Grosvenor Victoria Casino out of £33,600 have met the rough hand of justice. The five gang members, who distracted croupiers while swapping cards under the table on at least nine separate occasions, all pled guilty when their trial opened at the Old Bailey last month but only four showed up on Tuesday to take their lumps.
One of the cheats received a nine-month sentence that was suspended for one year, while two others received 12-month sentences suspended for two years, along with 200 hours of community service and 12-month bans from entering any gambling facilities. A fourth cheat’s sentencing was delayed to a later date.
The fifth gang member, 32-year-old Tarik Nergiz, wasn’t on hand to learn his fate as he’d fled the country the day after pleading guilty. Prosecutors informed the court that Nergiz had since been detained in France on charges of human trafficking ,for which he’d been sentenced to 12 months in prison. Nergiz will face his reckoning with UK justice once his French jail stint has been served and he’s deported to England.
