970x125
Scammers like those charged in the NBA and Mafia poker ring seem willing to go to any extreme to fix games — even using ear pieces so tiny they need to be ripped out by a magnet, a cheating pro has revealed.
Prosecutors detailed Thursday how the criminals behind the sensational multimillion-dollar basketball- and mob-tied scheme used “X-ray” tables to read cards lying face-down on them and accomplice players equipped with special contact lenses to pick up on marked cards.
But fraud pro Sal Piacente told CNN during a TV interview that the illicit moves are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to pulling the felt over the eyes of marks.
Piacente held in his hand a tiny earpiece — about the size of a shotgun shot — that he said some cheaters use to communicate with each other.
The ball is placed inside of the ear — so tiny that it is imperceptible, he said.
The device is so miniscule that a magnet is even needed to rip the metal ball away from the user’s eardrum to retrieve it, he said.
“If you were talking to me or standing right next to me … you can’t see it. When my partner is talking to me I hear it so loud,” said Piacente, who has been exposing such cheating techniques for decades.
Piacente said some of the tricks used by the criminals in the NBA and mob scheme are not particularly new.
The sham “X-ray” table, like much of the technology outlined in the indictment, is readily available for purchase online.
The popular cheating table “has cameras built into it that look upward at the cards,” Piacente said. “It can actually see through the green felt. … As long as the cards lie above the camera, the camera can see what the card is and then transmit it.”
The scammers may have also rigged Deckmate2 Card Shuffling machines, the official shuffler of the National Series of Poker that can shuffle a deck of cards in just 22 seconds, Piacente said.
The device includes a camera that notifies the casino or dealer if a card is missing and records where every card is inside the deck.
“The cheaters came up with ways of utilizing that camera as well to know what cards are being dealt and who’s getting them,” he said. “That shuffle machine is altered to transmit to an earpiece to tell the people who will win.”
There also are machines that can be tampered with to do a “false shuffle” in which the machine makes sounds as if the cards are being shuffled when they are actually not, he said.
Piacente demonstrated how high-tech chip-tray decoy phones can be placed on the table and can automatically calculate who will win the hand as soon as the dealer cuts the cards.
The devices can read how the deck is shuffled based on the arrangement of its barcode, analyze how every hand will be dealt in a game and then signal that information to an operator.
“That information is transmitted elsewhere and that person receiving the information sends it back,” he said.
Federal prosecutors alleged that members of some of New York City’s most notorious Mafia families worked with NBA figures to lure deep-pocketed victims to the fixed games, cheat them and then force them to pay their debts.
The mobsters paid prominent NBA figures such as Portland Trail Blazers coach Chauncy Billups and former Cleveland Cavaliers player Damon Jones to partake in the scam and lure victims to the card table to lose huge sums of money, authorities said.
The proceeds would be funneled back to Mafia, prosecutors said.
Separately, Miami Heat guard Terry Rozier, Jones and other associates are charged with providing inside information to bettors such as when players would be sitting out or pull themselves early from games.
