APs Wrongly Prosecuted - Keno - They're Suing Harrah's

[Bob21]

Put all the side arguments aside and return to the original article in Patch.

What did the players do wrong? Well, they traveled with large amounts of cash. Why would they do that? Probably to hide their winnings from the IRS... but that's NOT an issue here.

So the question is what did they do to warrant any other problem or lawsuit or investigatoon? I don't think they did anything wrong.

They didn't alter the payouts on the machine, so why should they be prosecuted?

The casino is required to file CTRs and not the players. And, by the way, even with $3,000 payouts there is still an obligation on CASINOS to monitor cash transactions.

If the casino tipped off police to stop the vehicle and harass the driver that is indeed wrong but I'm not exactly sure what crime that is but I'm sure it's a violation of something.

The first lawsuit was thrown out, according to the article, on a question of JURISDICTION and had nothing to do with the merits of the lawsuit.

That's where it all stands as I see it.

Alan, a good reasoned reply, but you're only addressing one aspect of what they were charged with. They were also charged for “manipulating keno machines”. I have no idea what that means but it’s hard for me to believe the prosecutors didn’t have some evidence they were doing something illegal.

A casino or prosecutor is not going to charge someone for just winning a lot of money. That makes no sense.

Did they manipulate the machines? Did they change the paytables?

The only thing I read is that they played machines with better paytables. I saw nothing that they tampered with the devices.

Alan, I’ve already responded to this in another post. It does look like they changed the pay tables. They somehow knew what denomination to bet to trigger the machines to pay out 5 times more than it was supposed to. The bug was written into the program by someone at the gaming company. The question is how did these people know the denomination to bet to get the machines to pay out incorrectly. And they also knew which machines had this bug. They found them in Joliet, Il and Tunica, MS at certain casinos...I think it was at MGM properties.

Unless you knew what demonation to play, these machines would not pay out an incorrect pay schedule. It could be some gambler hit on this combination by accident and informed others about it. The articles I’ve read have not said what this denomination is. The gaming company is the one who thought they most have got this information from an inside source. If they did, this is obviously cheating.

I’ve now read quite a few articles on this and can see why the casinos thought they were cheating. I can also see why they thought they’d get away with it.

It’s true the gaming company and casino weren’t able to connect these five people to an inside source, and I’m sure they tried hard.

The gaming company ended up paying MGM 2 million dollars for this error. I’m sure the gaming company is going through internal procedures to see how a bug like this got through their system.

All in all, an interesting case. The more I read about it, the more I think the gamblers might be innocent. But I can see why the gaming and caisnos thought they were guilty of illegal activity, if that makes any sense.