Casino insider tells (almost) all about security
Jeff Jonas knows
the Las Vegas gambling industry inside and out. As the founder and chief scientist
of Systems Research & Development (SRD), Jonas helped build numerous casino
systems before 2005 when his company was purchased
by IBM. Big Blue was intrigued by SRD's NORA system (Non-Obvious Relationship
Awareness), a technology that uncovers relationships that can be exploited fraudulently
for profit, such as connections between dealers and gamblers. Now a distinguished
engineer and chief scientist for IBM's Entity Analytic Solutions, Jonas is still
based in Las Vegas but is focused more on applying his technology to national
security and the banking industry.
Speaking at the O'Reilly
ETech conference on emerging technology in San Diego on Thursday, Jonas
promised to reveal some, if not all, of the secrets he learned about the casino
industry. Before the talk, he called some of his former clients to make sure
certain details could be revealed.
"My idea today was to tell more about the casino industry than I ever
told," Jonas said.
After Jonas moved to Vegas in 1990, he met a man who said his job was to cheat
casinos.
"I'm like 'are you a card counter?' He says 'you don't get it! That would
be like marijuana. What I do is like heroin!' I didn't know anything about this.
Then he proceeds to show me his disguises, all these glasses, his mustaches.
And I'm like 'this is going to be crazy.'"
Over the next 15 years Jonas helped pioneer facial
recognition technology and various other systems in casinos such as the
Bellagio, Treasure Island and Beau Rivage in Mississippi.
"Today possibly half the casinos in the world run something or another
that I had my hand in," he said.
Vegas seems to put an enormous focus on high-tech security, but in some ways
the casinos are just doing enough to get by. "They spend the minimum amount
of money on security and surveillance," Jonas said. "They'd rather
buy three more slot machines and make money. They only mess with you if you're
really, really cheating."
A casino like the Bellagio probably has 2,000 cameras connected to 50 monitors,
with just a few people watching live surveillance, Jonas said. But the information
is there to be scrutinized when casinos notice players winning unusually large
amounts of money.
In one case a dealer -- who said his family had been threatened - helped players
rake in US$250,000 at a blackjack table when he used a deck of "perfectly
ordered cards" that had been handed to him by one of the gamblers, according
to Jonas.
"They didn't detect this as it happened,"
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