Wednesday, August 04, 2010

Canada's Biggest Casino Hit With Another Mini-Baccarat Scam...This Time By Korean Card-Switchers!

The Casino Rama in Ontario was one of the biggest victims of the Vietnamese Tran Organization's false-shuffle mini-baccarat scam (search blog for details). Now it has been hit again by a Korean casino-cheat team with six members...and for big money! According to Canadian casino-crime investigators, Jae Gook Kim, 30, Tae Sik Kim, 55, Sam Yeung Kim, 45, John Yoon Lee, 47, and Seung Chui Cho, 22, all of Seoul, Korea, and Un Gi Kim, 37, of Toronto, bilked Casino Rama out of more than $200,000 by switching cards on the midi-baccarat game, which is a modified version of mini-baccarat. The cheating took place the first two days of August.

The casino cops obtained search warrants of the cheat organization's hotel rooms and seized fifteen grand. The rest of their cheat-winnings were not found. Perhaps the cheats sent the money back to Korea or blew it legitimately gambling somewhere else...who knows? In any event, all six were charged with cheating at gambling and possession of property worth more than $5,000 obtained in a criminal enterprise. They are being held pending a bail hearing.

My take: First of all, I don't know why casinos bothered putting in midi-baccarat tables. Unlike MINI-baccarat, players get to touch the first two cards of each hand, making the casinos vulnerable to card-switching.

As far as this Korean casino-cheat team goes, they were probably good but probably as well a bit too greedy. Two hundred grand is a big number over two days, even in high-action baccarat pits. I'm assuming that after the casino lost the ton of money to the Korean cheats, at some point they began zooming in their surveillance cameras and caught the switches. I wonder why it took "$200,000 long" to finally realize what was going on.

Also note that Korean casino-cheat teams and gangs are becoming much more prevalent the past few years, both in brick and mortar and online casinos. Just a few weeks ago, a huge Korean online poker cheating ring was busted for hacking into source codes of several online poker rooms.