• Can You Cheat A Slot Machine Game
• Can You Cheat A Slot Machine
• Can You Cheat A Slot Machine Play
• Georgia Skill Slot Machine Cheats

Most slots players have dreamed about using slot machine hacks and cheats to bring down the house. I’ll walk you through some of the most successful slot machine cheats, as well as some outdated techniques that will fail every time.

Carmichael was in the slot machine cheating business for over 20 years. 30 years ago, when Carmichael got started, the state-of-the-art slot machine cheating tool was a “top-bottom joint”, which is just a piece of metal that slides into the coin release slot. This triggers un-earned payouts in massive amounts—or at least it did in 1980. The cheater ties a thin cord around a coin and then places it in the slot until it registers a.

Some of these video slot machine hacks and cheats used to work, but they don’t any longer. Before I begin, let me start with a disclaimer. Hacking slot machines is against the law in most countries. I do not advise it, and LegitGamblingSites.com does not endorse it.

Let’s see how slot machines work and whether you can cheat slots today.

Casino Slot Machine Hacks

There are some slot machine hacks that worked on old-school slots. I don’t recommend trying these today. They won’t work on modern slot machines which have evolved to deal with them. If you try these and get caught, you’ll likely get banned from the casino for life. Nonetheless, they did work once upon a time, and if you happen to find a classic slot machine in a bar, you might be able to try some of these.

The Yo-Yo Slot Hack

I have a confession to make before I tell you about this slot hack. I have used this successfully, but not on slot machines. I pulled it off once or twice on the vending machines in my high school and scored a free bottle of Coca Cola or two.

The idea is to tie a thin string around a coin and deposit it. When a deposit is registered, you yank the string and pull it out. If you know anything about modern slot machines, you probably just laughed out loud. Out of all the slot machine hacks and cheats, this most definitely would not work today.

The Counterfeit Coin Trick

Before scanning technology became widespread, slot machines used to accept bets based on the weight of the coin. The question of how to hack slot machines had a real answer: Use fake coins which were the same weight as real ones. They used similar metals or hard material, and they got away with it for a long time.

Again, technology has caught up and rendered this slot machine cheat impotent. Ask any experienced player, and they’ll tell you that it’s difficult enough to get a slot to accept some real coins, never mind counterfeit ones!

Tampering With Payout Switches

Throughout gaming history, slot machine hacks and cheats have brought on some hilarious inventions. A number of them involve guitar strings and metal wires. At one point, players would attach hooks and metal claws to the end of metal wire or strings and feed it through the cooling system of the slot machine. They’d rattle around for a while, and eventually, they’d hit the payout switch.

This hack would never work on an electronic slot machine. To understand why, you should read our report on Random Number Generators (RNG). There are no physical switches which activate payouts in modern slot machines. The only thing tampering with slot machines will get you these days is a place on the sidewalk when the casino security team catches you.

Slot Machine Cheat Codes

As slot machines evolved past basic mechanical parts and made use of technology like RNGs and electronic sensors, computer programmers became a key part of keeping them honest.

What happens when the computer programmer who’s supposed to do his job lets temptation get the better of him? Just ask Ronald Dale Harris. He was in charge of finding and fixing software flaws. He was a high-level programmer and worked for the Nevada Gaming Control Board in the 1990s. One day, for whatever reason, he decided to modify some slots so it would pay out when he entered a certain sequence of coins.

Harris got away with this for a long time, but his accomplice got busted when they tried the same thing on keno. Harris was locked up for seven years, but he got out in two for good behavior. I doubt he has ever tried to hack casino slot machines again, especially since all Vegas casinos have banned him.

A Mobile Slot Machine Hack Which Really Worked

What happens when you take cash-rich American casinos, Russian mobsters, high-tech equipment, and a team of jet-setting slot players and put them together? No, this isn’t the plot of a bad B movie, this slot machine hack really happened. In fact, it may still be happening today.

In the summer of 2014, a casino in St. Louis noticed some of its machines had paid out much more than they should have according to their payback averages. After watching the security footage of the casino, they found the same man winning again and again, and they knew he was a slot machine hacker right away. They just had to figure out how he was doing it. They noticed three things:

• He was holding his iPhone close to the screen when playing
• He was winning on Aristocrat slots
• And he was “jabbing” the spin button suddenly after long pauses

It soon became apparent that lots of other casinos had been the victims of slot machine hacking, and the same man was involved in most of the slot machine hacks and cheats. Authorities tracked down Murat Bilev and discovered he was part of a Russian team which had successfully hacked slots from the United States to Macau, bilking the casinos for millions.

After arresting him on a return trip to the US, Bilev spilled the beans. He was part of a Russian slot machine hacking team which figured out the exact timing of how the PRNGs work in Aristocrat slots. His phone was equipped was a slot machine hacking app which told him exactly when to press the spin button, hence the sudden hand movements after long pauses.

Bilev was sentenced to two years in prison and deported from the USA. However, authorities worry that the scam has evolved and there are still teams out there using slot machine hacks and cheats today.

Are slot machine hacking apps available online? Yes, but if you get caught using them, you’ll end up in the slammer like Murat Bilev. I’d strongly advise against it.

What If You Do Discover a Slot Machine Hack?

If you do figure out how to hack casino slot machines, you’ll face a moral and legal choice: to steal or not to steal.

I’d advise you not to. You see, there’s an alternative option, and it could be just as lucrative. Contact the casino slot machine company, tell them you’ve found a bug, and make a contract for a reward if you show them and are proven correct.

Some slots companies will dismiss you as a quack, but believe it or not, lots of them will give you an audience, especially if they suspect there’s a bug in their slot machine software.

Heck, you could even get a job as a consultant. After all, you’ve figured out a slot machine flaw that their coders didn’t recognize.

Can You Really Hack Slot Machines?

If you read the full article on slot machine hacks and cheats above, then you’ll know the answer is yes. But it takes some serious skills and connections. Both of the successful slot machine hackers mentioned here ended up in prison. And you have to ask yourself, is it really worth it?

I personally don’t think so. For me, slot machines are about the thrill of potentially winning a life-changing jackpot. I don’t even particularly want to win by cheating. I’d worry about being found out and having to look over my shoulder for the rest of my days.

Instead, I advise you to relax, have fun, learn all you can about how slots work, and forget slot machine hacks and cheats. If there’s such a thing as karma, you might even get rewarded for deciding not to try slot machine hacks!

The secretive world of casino cheaters, the seedy underbelly of the gambling industry, is typically associated with poker and table games.

Cheats physically manipulate cards, dice, wheels, and chips to gain an unfair advantage over the house. But cheaters have long targeted machine games like the slots, too. Ever since the first “one-armed bandits” of old hit saloon floors in San Francisco at the turn of the 20th century, cheats have endeavored to trigger jackpots and payouts unfairly.

The earliest mechanical slot machines on the market accepted nickels, prompting cheaters to melt down cheap metal and fashion counterfeit coins known as “slot slugs.” These tricked the game into offering a free spin. When dimes became the coin of choice, they filed down pennies to the circumference of a 10-cent piece, thus “earning” a nine-cent rebate on every spin.

Slot cheats also liked to drill a hole through genuine coins. They would tie it to some fishing line, play the coin, and let it fall just far enough to trigger a spin. Then, they would pull it back out and repeat the process to play for free.

Eventually, slot machine manufacturers countered those efforts with a device called the “coin escalator,” which displayed previously played coins in a window for all to see. When the operator spotted slugs, filed down pennies, or an insufficient number of wagers in the coin escalator, they knew a cheater was in their midst.

As the mechanical three-reel slots of old gave way to electronic video slots, coin-based machines were replaced by those which accept cash bills or barcoded casino vouchers. Manufacturers also replaced the drum reel setup with complex random number generators (RNGs) that “shuffled” the reels into seemingly infinite combinations.

These technological advancements stemmed the tide of slot cheating for a while, but gamblers who try to get over on the house are relentless if nothing else. Cheaters found more creative ways, engaging in a back and forth crusade with the casinos that continues to this day.

In the past, I’ve taken the time to write up guides on the various ways to cheat casino games, including poker, blackjack, roulette, and craps. But I’ve also included very serious reasons why you should never try them. In this guide, you’ll find five ways you can cheat when playing slot machines circa 2019 and beyond, along with why readers should never attempt it.

1 – Flashing a “Light Wand” to Fool the Machine’s Payout Sensor and Triggering a Jackpot

If you’ve ever heard of the “top-bottom joint,” the “kickstand,” or the “monkey paw,” congratulations! You know more about slot machine cheating than you probably should. But you probably also know about Tommy Glenn Carmichael, the so-called “Godfather of Slot Machine Cheats.”

Carmichael, a former television repairman who parlayed his technical skills into a career as a professional cheat, invented all three of those devices used to fool a mechanical slot’s sensors into unloading its coin hopper on command.

In an interview with the Los Angeles Times conducted back in 2003, convicted slot thief Jerry Criner spoke of Carmichael in reverent tones:

“A legend. He’s the greatest mind as far as developing cheating tools.”

As for the man himself, Carmichael told the newspaper he was but a humble tinkerer who never said no to a challenge:

“Figure out how a machine counts money and then work your way into the machine. We got to playing around, and I could see where it was pretty easy to do. Give me a slot machine and I’ll beat it.”

When the electronic slots and their sensitive sensors used to detect lights and lasers became the norm, Carmichael wasted no time in purchasing an IGT brand machine for himself. Almost immediately, his ingenious mind went to work deconstructing the sensor array. Before long, Carmichael had developed his latest cheating tool, the “light wand.”

Here’s how Carmichael described his light wand epiphany, which occurred as he tricked a casino employee into providing access to an IGT machine’s inner workings:

“The second I opened it up, I knew how to beat it. He told me so much I thought he had called the law. I thought he was trying to stall us.”

Mark Robinson, the former manager of the Nevada Gambling Control Board’s Electronic Services Division, told the LA Times:

“The light would shine in there and be so bright that the sensor would be blinded, causing the hopper to not realize it was paying out the coins.”

Wielding nothing more than a camera battery and a miniaturized lightbulb, Carmichael went to work, bilking casinos from coast to coast out of $10,000 or more per day.

Why You Shouldn’t Fool the Payout Sensors

Like all swindlers, however, Carmichael’s refusal to walk away a “winner” led to his downfall. He was caught deploying a light wand to win jackpots in 1996 and again in 1998, before fleeing Las Vegas for Atlantic City. But his reputation preceded him, and private detectives employed by casinos there quickly spotted Carmichael and took him down.

The feds stripped Carmichael of every last penny from his ill-gotten gains, sentenced him to one year in prison, and placed him on extended probation. That’s reason enough to avoid the light wand “hack,” as is the method’s relatively outdated practicality in the modern age.

2 – Recording Spins on a Smartphone to Crack a Slot’s Randomization Pattern

This scam is so elegant and effective that casinos and slot machine manufacturers alike still haven’t been able to stop it.

During the 2000s, international slot makers Novomatic and Aristocrat Leisure began receiving disturbing reports from their respective casino clientele. Apparently, machines from both manufacturers had been observed paying out small to medium-sized payouts far more often than their preprogrammed odds should’ve allowed.

Comprehensive reviews and investigations were conducted to audit the machines in question, but engineers and analysts could find no trace of physical manipulation.

In 2011, Novomatic issued the following statement to client casinos to warn them about potential weaknesses in its slots “pseudo random number generators” (PRNGs):

“Through targeted and prolonged observation of the individual game sequences as well as possibly recording individual games, it might be possible to allegedly identify a kind of ‘pattern’ in the game results.”

Can You Cheat A Slot Machine Game

As it turns out, a slot’s RNG isn’t technically randomized because it relies on manmade inputs, such as the second hand of the machine’s internal clock, to generate its seemingly random results. From the average player’s perspective, the results will definitely appear random over both short- and long-term sessions.

But as Novomatic admitted in its internal memo, the “pseudo” nature of a PRNG ensures that detectable patterns can be discerned from the reels’ final alignment, provided a player knew what to watch for.

A professional computer hacker known only as “Alex” was one such player, a gifted mathematical mind capable of cracking convoluted coded algorithms in his head. After deciphering the codes behind a particular model of Novomatic slot machine, then the Aristocrat Mark IV model, Alex designed a computer program to predict exactly when players should press the “SPIN” button.

Alex formed a team of players and taught them to use iPhone cameras to secretly record a few dozen low-stakes spins. This footage was then uploaded to Alex’s computer, which crunched the patterns onscreen to determine, down to the millisecond, when the “SPIN” button should be pressed to trigger a winner.

From there, all Alex had to do was send an automated text message timed with a 0.25-second delay to his cheater’s phone, thus providing the average human’s reaction time as a window. A quarter of a second later, with the stakes now increased significantly, the player would press “SPIN” and watch the screen light up for a sizable score.

Why You Shouldn’t Crack a Slot’s Randomization Pattern

Both companies acknowledge that their machines are vulnerable to Alex’s version of slot hacking. But as he pointed out in an interview with Wired magazine in 2017, his scheme isn’t technically considered cheating because nobody physically manipulates the machine:

“We, in fact, do not meddle with the machines – there is no actual hacking taking place. My agents are just gamers, like the rest of them. Only they are capable of making better predictions in their betting… Yes, that capability is gained through my technology, it’s true. But why should it be against the law? On the basic level, it’s like using a calculator for counting faster and more accurately, rather than relying on one’s natural capacity.”

Alex himself was never caught, thanks to his identity concealing skills and Russian residency, but several of his “agents” have been apprehended all over the world. As for the mastermind himself, Alex failed in convincing Aristocrat to hire him on as a security consultant.

Today, he makes a living selling his tech for five-figures a pop on the dark web rather than resort to cheating himself.

So, unless you’re a savant like him with otherworldly math skills and the “Rain Man” ability to read PRNGs in your sleep, or have $20,000 to spend on a slot-cheating system, hacking the game isn’t a great idea.

3 – Using Computers and Advanced Tech Skills to Rig the Machine for Instant Jackpots

Another case of computer engineering knowledge becoming the cheat’s tool of choice involves a fair share of mystery more than 20 years later.

Beginning in 1996, former locksmith Dennis Nikrasch used the “brute force” style of computer hacking to essentially break the machine’s payout sensors. Using a blocker to screen the surveillance cameras, Nikrasch took less than a minute to pick the lock, open the machine’s interface, and attach a device that manipulated the reels’ RNG. Just like that, Nikrasch was gone like a ghost, leaving his blocker behind to play the game until an inevitable jackpot was triggered shortly thereafter.

Speaking with the Las Vegas Sun, former chief of the Enforcement Division of the Nevada Gaming Control Board (NGCB) Keith Copher offered begrudging respect when referencing Nikrasch’s scam:

“He had the most sophisticated system we’ve ever seen. We don’t know that he’s passed it along, and if he has, he’d better tell us.”

J. Gregory Damm, the assistant US Attorney who ultimately prosecuted Nikrasch for his litany of crimes, told the newspaper the use of a proxy helped hinder casino security systems:

“He would be in the casino a very short period of time. He would fix the machine, then leave. He wasn’t present when the jackpot was hit.”

Why You Shouldn’t Rig Slot Machines

Nikrasch absconded with more than $6 million in stolen slot funds before his run was cut short, sending him to prison for seven years.

Once again, the biggest reason to avoid this slot cheating method is impracticability, because Nikrasch took his tech secrets to the grave.

4 – Watching for Players Who Leave Money on the Machine So You Can Spin for Free

Whether you count this one as cheating is up to your own moral code, but what do you do when a neighboring player leaves a few bucks in the next machine over?

Can You Cheat A Slot Machine

You see them take their Player’s Card, and even leave the casino, so you’re sure they’re not coming back for that last dollar or two. Do you slide over and play the free spins?

If you’re like Colorado resident and gambling man “Dan” (his last name hasn’t been made public), you take your shot at winning a jackpot on the forgetful player’s dime.

Why You Shouldn’t Use Other Players’ Money

While gambling in a Central City casino two years ago, Dan saw a fellow slot player leave $2 on a nearby machine. After playing two spins and winning nothing, Dan continued his own game for awhile before security arrived and escorted him to the dreaded back room.

Here’s how Dan described the scene to his local KDVR News station after the ordeal was over:

Can You Cheat A Slot Machine Play

“There was no intent to steal from anybody. I had no idea. I go upstairs to the third floor into a dirty little room and someone tells me I stole $2 from the casino. They said they had it all on camera. I was guilty, I guess. You’re certainly not stealing it from the casino because it wasn’t theirs to begin with. There are certainly times where there are ‘laws,’ but they are not morally or ethically correct.”

Dan was charged under Colorado Statute 12-47.1-823(1)(c), which covers various forms of casino cheating. In this case, the casino claims ownership over any lost, forgotten, or unused funds in its facility, so Dan technically stole $2 from the house and not the other player.

He was arrested, charged with criminal conduct, levied with $250 in fines, forced to pay for FBI criminal background checks, placed on probation, and banned from all Colorado casinos for a full year.

And while Dan’s case might seem like an outlier, consider that Colorado charged nearly 1,000 players for stealing slot funds in 2017 alone. Similar laws are on the books in Las Vegas and elsewhere, so when you see a few dollars flashing on an unclaimed machine, think twice before trying to turn somebody else’s money into your life-changing jackpot moment.

5 – Counterfeiting Bills or “Shaving” Coins to Trick the Machine Into a Free Spin

I covered the concept of counterfeit coin slugs in the introduction, and nowadays, you’ll only find a handful of old-school coin-operated slots in Downtown Las Vegas. You can blame infamous counterfeiter Louis “The Coin” Colavecchio for that development.

Why You Shouldn’t Counterfeit Bills or Coins

During his reign as the East Coast’s preeminent slot cheat, Colavecchio used genuine steel dies from U.S. Mint printing presses to trick the machines. That ploy wound up resulting in a seven-year prison bid, leaving the formerly flush “Coin” Colavecchio penniless and out of options.

After his release, Colavecchio was forced to adapt to a brave new world of cash and voucher-operated slots. Predictably, he tried to expand his operation into counterfeit $100 bills, hoping to hit high-stakes machines for six-figure scores.

And just as predictably, the U.S. Secret Service swooped in to arrest the now 77-year old Colavecchio in 2018.

Georgia Skill Slot Machine Cheats

Counterfeiting is one of the most serious federal crimes imaginable, and when you add in casino surveillance, this cheating recipe just doesn’t add up.

Conclusion

Slot machines probably inspire so many cheating attempts simply because of the volatile gameplay they offer. When winners can come few and far between, and losing by session’s end is a statistical certainty barring a big jackpot, grinding the slots can get downright depressing in the worst of times.

Cheaters who refuse to accept the “boom and bust” dynamic of the slots will always try to gain the upper hand, but as these five entries make clear, casinos are always one step ahead of the culprits.

Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus.