Police in the Dutch city of Venlo arrested earlier this week four individuals at Holland Casino after surveillance staff at the gambling venue caught them in the act of trying to manipulate the outcome of an automated roulette machine.
Police said that all of the arrested roulette scammers were from Georgia and were persons of interest in reference to similar crimes currently investigated by Interpol. The arrested individuals were believed to have targeted other casinos around the Netherlands and in other European countries.
As mentioned above, the four scammers targeted Holland Casino’s electronic roulette machines. Police officers said that they conducted their scam by first breaking the lid of a gambling device and then lifting the glass off the roulette machine.
They then made sure that the ball landed in the right box in order for the machine to register a win. Police said that they have seized a large sum of money from the four suspects as well as a number of yet to be redeemed vouchers they had obtained through their illicit scheme.
Over the course of an investigation opened into the four arrested individuals’ activities, police officers discovered that they might have been active in other casino locations around the Netherlands. They are also believed to have targeted and scammed other European casinos, as well.
The House Always Wins
Commenting on the incident, Venlo police said in a statement that “the crooks bet at the wrong casino and outbid themselves.” The statement went on that the “house has won, and to speak in Monopoly terms, the crooks have drawn the ‘Go Directly to Jail’ card.”
The four arrested individuals have also drawn the attention of authorities in other European countries. Dutch police said that they have been working with counterparts in other countries where casinos might have been targeted by the suspects.
Police officers from the Netherlands have also been cooperating with Interpol as part of a broader initiative to tackle mobile banditry – the term used for international crime groups that are active across borders. Such groups are often linked to burglaries, theft, pickpocketing, fraud, and casino scams in the case of the recently caught group of four Georgians.
Commenting on the recent incident, a spokesperson for Holland Casino said that they have never experienced this type of scam. However, the gambling venue in Venlo does not see a reason to take any specific measures, “because our employees have thwarted the criminals’ attempt” to defraud the casino.
The spokesperson’s statement went on that “Holland Casino has state-of-the-art techniques to detect fraud” and that they are constantly working to improve their tools and practices to detect all forms of fraud.
Earlier this year, police in the Cypriot city of Limassol arrested a dealer working at the local casino on suspicion that he had tempered with the roulette wheel to help a patron scam the gambling venue out of €5,800. The fraud was caught on CCTV.
Source: FOUR GEORGIANS ARRESTED OVER CASINO ROULETTE SCAM, NL Times
Follow us on Facebook and Twitter to stay up to date on the day’s top casino news stories
