Mississippi casinos turning to high-tech tokens to ward off slot cheaters

Slot players who try to beat the one-armed bandits with phony tokens may find themselves in a bind at Grand Casino's properties in Mississippi.

The company is rolling out new tokens and the technology to make sure they're legitimate.

The new tokens have bar codes in them, and the coin mechanism will read the code along with measuring metal content, thickness and diameter. They already have been introduced at Grand's Gulfport and Tunica casinos, and will be introduced next week at Grand Biloxi.

"This is mainly to protect the company against slugs," said Jerry Artigliere, vice president of slot operations at Grand.

Most attempts to fool the machines are done with blank metal discs - slugs - with the same composition and size as real tokens, casino operators said.

The new tokens should prevent cheaters from successfully using slugs, said Hank Thomas, vice president of security at Grand Tunica.

The new $1 tokens have a different metallic makeup than the old ones and the tokens used at other casinos, Thomas said. That has an additional benefit: Grand (and other casinos) will save time and money exchanging tokens from other casinos dropped into their slots, he said.

Bills are another problem. Most slot machines, video poker and other games take everything from $1 to $100 bills. Counterfeits are a concern.

Bogus ones are not usually a problem. The U.S. Treasury has redesigned and issued bills of other denominations, including security features such as a security thread, enlarged portrait, microprinting and watermark of the portrait.

"We use a minimum of five sensing technologies, which are all based on the security built into U.S. currency," said Gwen Mathis, a spokesman for JCM America Corp., which created bill acceptors for the casino industry.

If you use only one type of sensor, the crooks can experiment with it until they find a way around it, Mathis said.

"It takes a very sophisticated operation to create a bill that is good enough to pass through a bill acceptor," she said.

And even if a counterfeiter does succeed, it normally is discovered within four hours, and with the technology within the acceptor along with surveillance, casino operators can identify who put the bad bill in, Mathis said.

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