When you’ve got hackers on your side, the house takes all.
Since the invention of the card game, players have been looking for ways to stack the deck. Now, with the development of automated card shufflers, it would appear that a group well practiced in such illicit activities—the Costa Nostra mafia—may have found a new way to rig games for easy money. And, weirdly enough, those games are alleged to have involved a bunch of current and former NBA officials and players, who are now in quite a bit of trouble.
A new federal indictment claims that members of organized crime families hosted games that used hacked card shufflers. Those shufflers allowed the players who were in on the ruse to play accordingly and win big time, the indictment claims. The story was originally picked up by Wired, which says it managed to reproduce a hack of one particular brand of card shuffler, the Deckmate 2.
The indictment doesn’t mention the brand of deck shuffler relevant to the case, although Wired has reported the following:
In their games…several alleged defendants are said to have used pre-rigged Deckmate 2 shufflers under their own control rather than hack machines owned by others via their USB port [the machines can also be hacked, the outlet notes].
However, the accused schemers at the heart of the case are also said to have used a whole assortment of other bizarre technologies to keep the odds in their favor. According to the indictment, those technologies included “electronic poker chip trays” that could “secretly read cards placed on the poker table.
