Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

Meet James Taylor:

Going after ill-gotten gains

If you fancy the notion of cheating a casino, Control Board agent fancies arresting you

James Taylor

Sam Morris

Gaming Control Board investigator James Taylor shows some of the evidence seized over the years in probes of casino cheaters. The board’s agents make as many as 500 such arrests annually.

It was warm inside, and James Taylor apologized before taking off his suit jacket, folding it next to the lectern and turning back to reveal a heavy holster at the waist of his white dress shirt.

“Sorry if you’re offended by guns,” he said — no doubt distinguishing himself as both the first and last person to ask this class of accounting students to forgive their guest speaker his firearm.

Taylor has spent 15 years with the Gaming Control Board, where one week of his work as an investigator must be more exciting than anything students in this UNLV classroom will do during their entire accounting careers. Unless, of course, they work for an outfit like the board: Taylor tells them of colleagues who spring surprise audits on casinos, landing like locusts to “take over a room, set up shop for a year and tear through everything.”

A student up front can restrain himself no longer. “Nice,” he announces; a kind of satisfied, macho approval. “Niiiice.”

This is a forensic accounting class, where students learn to recognize fraud and graft — surely the sexiest course in the greater accounting curriculum. It’s a Wednesday evening seminar, with students taking notes as Taylor talks and plays clips of casino surveillance footage: Here’s a guy shoving chips up his sleeve; here’s a guy swapping cards with a friend; here’s a pair of crooks feeding a cheating device into the body of a slot machine, making it spit coins.

Here’s the Gaming Control Board agent who watched these guys hit six slot machines before he descended on them, running full speed into the grainy frame, tackling one cheat and knocking down another simultaneously, toppling them like dummy dominoes.

Now it’s two students, almost simultaneously: “Niiiice.”

Control Board agents make from 400 to 500 arrests a year. Lately, the numbers have gone up: More people are being arrested for cheating or embezzling from casinos, Taylor says. Nationally, the number of forensic accountants has also swelled. When the economy goes down scam artists, and demand for people who can catch them, goes up.

When slot machines went coinless, investigators thought most of the nonsense — the quarters on strings, the magnets on sticks, the devices that pulsed light in a way that confused slot computers — was over.

They were wrong. Even machines with closely monitored computer payouts have been hacked. A few years ago employees at a few casinos noticed, all on the same night, that several slot machines were holding less cash than the internal computers claimed, a discrepancy that signaled scam.

As it happened, someone built a device that tricked slot machines into processing $1 bills as $100 bills. After agents made arrests, Taylor explained, they videotaped themselves testing the contraption: Wobbly footage shows a video poker game with $8.50 in credits. Someone activates the device, presents a dollar bill, then feeds it into the machine: $108.50 in credits.

There’s a collective classroom moan: “Woooooah.”

Then someone says it: “Niiice.”

“No,” a future accountant responds, correcting the error. “Not nice.”

Join the Discussion:

Check this out for a full explanation of our conversion to the LiveFyre commenting system and instructions on how to sign up for an account.

Full comments policy