For as long as there have been slot machines or any kind of gambling, even when people play Slotzo slots, there have been people who have tried to play the system to win. Sometimes a good strategy works other games this does not apply but a basic cheat is something entirely different.
In 2017 a Russian hacker who went by the name of Alex claimed to be able to turn a casino machine into an ATM. In a lengthy open interview he admitted that he had made millions of dollars through his talent for reverse engineering of pseudo random number generators, basically the brains of a slot machine. Alex was so blatant about his cheat he even contacted Australian slot machine manufacturer, Aristocrat, to strike a deal and said that he would close down his eight year cheat operation in return for an eight figure sum from Aristocrat.
That was a high tech cheat operation, however, at the opposite end of the scale we have the coin attached to a piece of string as the lowest technical cheat mechanism around. Let’s see what else there is out there but remember cheating a slot machine is illegal.
We’ve mentioned the coin on a string. The cheat cannot get any more basic as that. Attach the coin to a string and once it has tripped the mechanism of the machine then the coin is pulled out again, in essence therefore not costing the player a penny. There is also the basic cheat of copying coins. In Nevada in the eighties there was a company that sold a line of washers that were identical in size and weight to a US coin. Slot machine players used this to their full advantage likewise foreign coins too.
In the Sixties and Seventies players used a magnetism method to cheat a slot machine. A strong magnet could make the reels roll freely instead of stopping where they were supposed to stop. Today this method wouldn’t work and machines are now operated by RNG, a random number generator making it much harder to cheat.
The Big Bertha slot machine was exactly that, so big that in the nineties in Nevada a woman climbed inside the machine and fixed the reels and climbed back out again to collect the winnings. To a passer by and other players everything seemed perfectly normal, however, the security guards realized and the woman was later arrested.
The Nevada Gaming Commission employed someone as an engineer to work on monitoring and auditing the systems of electronic gaming devices. Alas, he saw an opportunity and tried to use this to his advantage and was arrested in New Jersey in 1995 after winning USD100,000 by using inside information.
As slots have developed so has the security behind the machines. Cheating is illegal and also almost impossible.
