 Good afternoon everybody. My name is Paul Wilson. Welcome to the Art of the Con and it's not the Art of the Convention. The Art of the Con game is as old as human civilization. And since the first sucker got taken until today, the principles of deception have been essentially the same. I've been interested in this since I was eight years old. That's 35 years of my life dedicated to any information I could find about how con artists, cheaters and casino players can beat the house. Now, luckily for me about five years ago, about 10 years ago I got involved in film and television, but about five years ago I did a TV show called The Takedown. And this was an attempt to take some of my experiences as a casino player. I was an advantage player in Europe for several years. And my experience in cheating and conning that I had picked up from my friends, I've never been a thief and I don't consider card counting theft. I consider it thinking at the table. But I've never been a thief. I've never stolen from anybody in my life that I'm willing to admit to you right now. But I have been very lucky to have a mind for deception. I'm very interested in magic and conjuring. I think these people think in very similar ways to people who think how can we beat a casino game. And I've been developing this knowledge over all of my life. And about five years ago we did The Takedown, which is an opportunity to walk into casinos with a camera crew, pull off scams and then explain how we did it. Sometimes we got arrested, sometimes we walked out with all the money. And right after that I did a TV show called The Real Hustle. Thank you very much to that guy. And I wrote and presented The Real Hustle for 11 seasons, the last season finished this year. And over that time have performed over 400 cons and scams. On real people with hidden cameras, despite what the papers have tried to claim, it was proven that we do this with people completely unaware and nobody is complicit except for the person who set that person up. So I got the opportunity to pull every single scam I had ever heard of and many more that I had never heard of. And that means that I've pulled more scams than anyone in history. No con artist ever had to pull 400 different scams in his career unless he was a complete idiot. Luckily that was my cue. So to talk about the art of the con, let's talk a little bit about how cons work. Basically they all work in the same way. In some cons the hook is bigger than a small con. You might just have a simple little suggestion and a big con it might be something that you keep going for many months or even years. So they all work the same way. Let me give you an example. Let's say someone walks up to you in a bar and they bet you that they can make you turn over your hands without even touching you. Now it's important that this is in a bar because you need to be drinking for this to work. But let's try it. If you have something in your hands please put it down. Okay. And I want everyone to put both your hands out in front of you. All right. Palm up like this. Okay. Everybody who just turned their hands over owes me 10 bucks. And there's a guy over here who turned his hands over realized what was happening. Turn him over again. You turned your hands twice sir. You owe me 20. This is what we would call a confidence trick. It's a very simple confidence trick. But it illustrates how they all work. Now if you want to understand how confidence tricks work the first thing you should do is look in a dictionary. If you look in a dictionary look up the word confidence first of all and you'll find that these are incredibly apt. The feeling or belief that one can rely on someone or something. Imagine what you can do with that. It has other meanings as well. The state of feeling certain about the truth of something. Again, with someone's confidence you can really abuse a situation. And if you look at the last a feeling of self assurance arising from one's appreciation of one's own abilities or qualities. This is a particularly important one because everybody thinks they're smarter than everybody else. And if you let them think that you can take them for the biggest ride of their lives. Now I've proven this in many different ways. I've been in a room talking to potential TV producers and they said, you know, you seem like an ordinary guy. We're looking for the dog, the bounty hunter of confidence games. I said, so what you're looking for is a guy with slick black hair, little pencil mustache, maybe wears a pinstripe suit. That's the guy you're looking for. That would be great. I said, yeah, he wouldn't make a penny. Because con artists look like me and they look like you and they make you feel better than them. It's one of the keys to being a good confidence artist. But there are two words confidence and trick. Just for interest I decided to look up trick as well. Incidentally that's one of the keys to the con. A con game is about giving the mark confidence, the victim. It's not about being confident as the con artist. I can do that all day. But if I can give you confidence, now we're talking. So what about trick? Well, there is a trick to all of these things. But if you look up trick, it becomes, it's not quite as clear as confidence. First of all, skillful act or illusion performed for entertainment. Well, there's nothing particularly entertaining about losing your house. But there is an act of skill and there's certainly a little bit of an illusion to a con game. But if we look down, a practical joke, no one's laughing. One of the things about con games and someone I respect a great deal said that it's a soft crime. But in actual fact, I don't think it is a soft crime. I think it's one of the hardest crimes of all. Someone mugs you in the street, shows you a gun and says, give me all your money. You give them all the money and you think, wow, that guy had a gun. What else could I do? But if I talk you into handing me over every penny in your savings account, you spend the rest of your life blaming yourself. And that's completely the wrong thing to do. Con artists are much better at conning you than you are at not being conned. So a practical joke definitely isn't the right way to look at it. Let's see what the next one is. Well, in a con game, someone definitely gets screwed. But this is a fair business agreement. So I wouldn't call that a particularly good one. I found this one by the way. I just included it for completeness. A sailor's turn at the wheel or helm usually lasting for two or four hours. I have no idea what that is unless it's a euphemism I haven't heard yet. Here's the real one. A cunning or skillful act or scheme intended to deceive or at wit. So how do con games affect any form of security? There it is. To get around any system, to get through any wall, you have to have some knowledge of deception, some idea of how you can get around that wall through the wall, under the wall, over it or ignore the wall entirely. And people who build walls think completely differently to the rest of us. So a cunning or skillful act, is there anything you do that's cunning or skillful? Is it designed to out wit or deceive? Now remember we've been doing this for centuries in con games. Now we're doing it online and the thinking is incredibly similar. So how do you spot a potential mark? Well today it's anybody with a digital device. Anybody could be a victim. But here's the way that you can spot a mark for a con game. I'm talking about a classic con game, the kind of thing I might pull on you. It's absolutely 100% guaranteed. A 100% guaranteed way to spot the victim, potential victim of a con or a scam. If you think you cannot be taken, you're just the person I want to meet. They are the greenest grass to a con man. They're the field that we want to dig up. Because if you think you can't get conned, we're going to confirm that for you all the way until we have everything from your bank account. So look in a mirror because there's always a con that'll get you. Now I know this for a fact. I literally have pulled every con in the book. What this means is I live my life in a state of paranoia. If you were to ask me how do you avoid being conned, don't talk to anyone, don't leave the house, don't buy anything, basically live in a cave for the rest of your life. You can be conned any time and so can I. So a little bit of understanding about how con games work will help you. I'm going to talk about how they work. I'm going to talk about why they work. I'm going to show you some very interesting slides with my friend Jason England in a little bit. But afterwards we're going to talk about how to protect people. We don't have a lot of time. I'm going to try and get it through pretty quickly. So let's talk about the con. Every con comes in three phases. As I said before, the length of those phases depends on the type of con you're talking about. Hook, line, and sinker. Now there are two other phases that we'll get to in a minute, but these are the keys to getting someone to hand over their keys. The hook is to set the bait and rope the mark. Now some cons will work for pretty much everybody. Those are pretty rare, but most cons will work for huge percentages of the population. The secret, of course, is to find out who wants to take the bait that you put on that hook. Today you can send 10 million emails and figure out who's going to come back to you. And there are reasons why people come back to you. It isn't just because they're stupid and it isn't because they're greedy. There are many more factors at work. People get involved with cons because it's something that they want. And something that they want is really important because if I know what you want, I will take everything that you have. And the hook is all about that. The hook is about putting something that you want on the table and then figuring out a way to get you to buy it, even though the whole thing is a lie. So let me start by telling you about this game here. It's a game called The Razzle and it's been around for a very long time. It's a carnival game. So it's not exactly the biggest con in the world. It certainly isn't Bernie Madoff, but it's one of the most interesting scams that I've ever learned. Now, when I worked for the BBC, they told me that I absolutely must not ever say something like, this is my favorite scam because, you know, for PR reasons, that's not the kind of line you want to say. This is my favorite scam. Now, the reason this is so brilliant is because it appears so simple and it appears so easy to understand. The Razzle is a game played on the Midway. It's been played in private clubs. They've even in Blackpool in the UK, they had little garages that they'd set. They'd open it up and bring people to them to play. And once they went in there, they wouldn't leave until they lost all of their money. The only other reason they'd leave is to go and get more money. Now, the way the game works is simple. As you can see, there's a cup, there are eight marbles in play. You also have this board here that has a bunch of little indentations. These are all numbered. When the marbles are rolled, they fall into those little holes. And then the numbers are counted up to give you a score. And that score is compared to this. So here we have a classic Razzle board. It tells us, for example, that if you were to get 15 points, if you were to add up all of those marbles, you would then get one and a half points. And if you get 10 points on a little slider, we'd have a little point slider for you, if you get 10 points, you would win. Now, the hook is the most important part to get people involved. If you want to rope the mark and get their interest, it's all about the hook. The great thing about this scam is you can hook it any way that you like. When I played this, we had playstations, we had Xboxes, we had plasma screen TVs, laptops, pretty much anything you could buy at Best Buy. And we had them piled up behind me. And you could choose any one of those prizes to play for. And if you got 10 points, I would give it to you. But there are a few rules. First of all, let's say it's only $2 a roll. That's not a lot of money. But if you get 29, which just so happens to be the most common number you'll get, we'll double your bet, but we'll also double your prizes. So now you're playing four pounds a time or four dollars in this case, but you're getting two prizes. So you get the plasma screen TV and you get the Xbox if you win. 29 comes up again, we double the bet again, we also double the prizes. And every now and again, you make that point and it goes on. A lot of the time, you'll make no points. 20, for example, will make you no points. 35 will make you no points. 22 will make you no points. But if you get 9, you get 8 points. You're almost there. Now that first rule that you play with me is the one that gets you almost half the way there. Then we double up a few times and I'll get you a couple of points the way there again. And here's the secret to the game. This is why it's a great scam is you only get points when I cheat. When I cheat on the count, I can give you 44, put you all the way up to five points. But I'm lying. I'm miscounting, but I'm doing it quickly. You don't notice and because you made five points, you're hardly going to squeal about it. And that's the beauty of this scam. I get you up to nine, maybe even nine and a half points and then I let you spend all of your money. Finally, when you've lost all your money, I take the cash that you just lost. I put it underneath the prizes and say, you know, my boss would hate it. But if you come back in five minutes with more money, I'll let you win these prizes and you'll get your money back. And they came back every single time because that hook was so deep. So the razzle is all about the hook. It's so good that they used to give these tickets away that which gave you a couple of rules for free because once you started playing and you had those points, how do you walk away? It's a brilliant, brilliant con. Here's a friendly player. There he is. Very happy to be on camera. The line is the journey between the hook and the moment where you're going to give away all your money. And the line is the most important part of a long con because the line is the longest part. For a long period of time, we'll be adding different ingredients, different convincers, maybe pulling you two steps back for every four steps forward. But the line is important. It's just like fishing. If you pull too hard, you'll break it and you'll lose the fish. So the line is what basically separates great con artists from good con artists. The more they can play you, the more money they'll get out of you. So the line is incredibly important. And if you think about it like this, it's like a pyramid that's being built upside down. You start with an idea or something that people really want to buy into and then you start adding to that two bricks on top. Maybe there are two truths. Another three bricks on top of that. Maybe one of those is a lie and two more truths. And you keep building until they're ready to stand on top of that pyramid. And that's when everything collapses. Now a great example of the line. Oh, again, this is out of sync. But here you go. No remorse, no sympathy, no problem. I'll say anything to get your money if I'm a real con man. The reason I don't do this for real, there's a couple of reasons. One is, is that if I did this for a living I would be, I would maybe be rich, famous or dead, possibly all three. But the real reason I don't do it is I just don't have the heart for it. You want to be a con man, you can't have a heart for anybody. You want to be a con man, you have to blame the victim. They'll say anything to take everything. And that's the secret to the line. Whatever it takes, that's what they'll do. Now the boxing scam is a great example of a classic scam where it's all line. It's a line that you never get away from. Even after they take your money, you're still on the line. And it was invented by a famous con artist by the name of the Yellow Kid. Joseph Yellow Kid Weil is possibly one of the greatest con artists of all time. Most of his scams made it into the movie This Thing. And he had many, many more. But the boxing scam was one of the cruelest. And it worked like this. You took someone willing to bet on a boxing game and you took him to several matches. He got to see many people winning and losing. But you always seem to have some inside information. So eventually you tip him to a private boxing match. A boxing match where a famous fighter is going to fight a famous contender but only for a group of gamblers. So a lot of money is going to be on the line. Now here's the hook. That famous boxer has decided to take a fall. And he's going to take a fall for a piece of the action because if you bet against the contender you're going to win everything. Now in order to convince you, first of all I've made friends with you. I've shown you that you can win money with my advice. But at this particular match I want you to bet a large sum of my money. Because the guy you're betting, the guy who's taking the bets, he doesn't like me very much. And if I give him too much cash he'll suspect something. So you as the mark have to put the money down for me. And since it's a lock why don't you put some of your own money down as well. And that's what the mark does. He goes, he watches a few matches and before the big match happens, before the fight he offers to put down more money. So suddenly he's more than equal to your bet. He puts the money down and by the second round he wishes he'd bet more. And so the chance is given to him to bet a lot more. Money he doesn't even have with him. But he knows it's a lock. He knows that guy's going to take a fall. Unfortunately the round before he does that the boxer throws a lucky punch and hits the contender, square on the temple putting him straight down to the canvas with blood pouring from his mouth. Everybody starts to run out of the joint. Not only has the guy lost but he's there when apparently somebody was killed and he was killed. The guy's on the mattress, he's dead, everyone's leaving and it seems to be over. Now we know he doesn't want to go back because the guy died. But he also owes all that money for the extra bet. So he is still on the line. And he's on the line to what he thinks are some really bad people. They're really just con artists. But they keep him on the line until he pays. And then when he pays they blackmail him for being in a room when a murder was committed. And he continues to pay. And some guys continue to pay until the day to put a gun to their own head. So the line can continue. And in some scams the line just goes on and on and on. Ask anybody who has an elderly relative who answered some junk mail telling them that some fortune teller could read their future. Suddenly they get thousands of these letters every single day. So the boxing scam was a scam designed to get somebody into a situation that they really couldn't get out of. And to milk them for that. And it all started with them just wanting to win a little money at a boxing match. The sinker is that moment when you're convinced enough to hand over the money. And the sinker is knowing when that moment is is really important because you can't play it too quickly. You can't simply say great you're ready give me the money. Instead you have to play it right. And once they hand you over the money it's a very short journey from that point to the sting. When you realize exactly what's happened to you and exactly what you've lost. Many people never report that it being scammed. And one of the reasons for that is that we in society blame people for being the victims of cons and scams. But in actual fact it's perfectly natural to fall for these. They're based on human psychology. So this thing is one of the harshest moments people feel. But just in case it is somebody who might go to the police we have something called the cool out. Now the cool out is a situation that's created to stop them from beefing about what just happened about them. If they're going to give you any trouble you can create a situation. If you think about the movie The Sting at the end Robert Shaw who supposedly one of the nastiest criminals from Chicago. Robert Shaw loses all his money. He loses all his money and he's a type of guy who would do something about it. But at that exact moment someone gets shot and he's then hustled out of there. Great use of the word hustle because that's it. He's hustled out of there by a cop who tells him never to come back. And the way the movie is constructed is the police officer believes it as well. And he is never going back. He's never gonna go back looking for that money. He doesn't want to spend the rest of his life in jail. Whatever happened in there he's lucky to have gotten out alive. That's a cool out. That's a severe form of cool out. But what interested me was related to the boxing scam. The black money swindle is a very simple scam. But it still works today. It works like this. You know that when money is canceled it's usually burned. But when it's transported across international lines one of the ways that they protect the cash and stop it from being spent is they soak it in a very thick black ink. So you end up with black pieces of paper. That ink cannot be removed. Except I know a guy who can do it. Now we happen to have a container of this money. No one knows it's missing. All we have to do is get the ink off. Now I have this kid who's come up with this chemical solution. All you have to do is do it yourself. I can't do it all myself then all that money would point to me. So if you want to buy some of the cash, I'll sell you the solution. All you have to do is go and make your own money. It's as simple as that. And I can prove it to you. I'll give you some. I'll give you some solution. You can go up to the hotel room, throw it into the bath, wait four or five hours and that ink will come off. And sure enough, it does. We break into your hotel room and switch that paper. But it convinces you that it works and then you buy a vanload of this stuff. Now this has happened many times. It goes back very, very far. In fact, Cout Victor Lustig, who sold the Eiffel Tower for scrap, he used to sell people a money making machine where you put a piece of blank paper into the machine, close it, wait a minute and then it would print real money. This was a magic trick you could buy for about $10 at the time. He was selling it for thousands. So the black money swindle really does work. And one of the things about it is nobody wants to go to anybody and say, guess what I did? I bought this black paper from a guy and had this magic liquid and you put it in the... Never mind. The rebound. So this is something that can come after the cool out. This is one of the cruelest aspects of cons and scams. And it's particularly done in a scam called the bank examiner's swindle. But the rebound is you go to the victim and you say, hey, we're the FBI and we're investigating a guy who's been selling black paper to people. Did you happen to buy some black paper from a guy? Maybe. Well, you know what? You can help us. Would you buy more? And you can take that mark for another swing. Now, to understand this fully, we need to talk about deception because this is just an age old form of deception. And deception is our business. And because it's 2012, I thought we'd do this in 3D. These are the 3Ds of deception. Desire, distraction and determination. Desire, of course, is what we already talked about. It's based on what people want or expect. If you can understand that, then you can take people for that right. But you have to get them on the bus first. So any form of deception usually starts with what the victim is expecting or wanting to see. Now, it can be a negative expectation as well as a positive expectation. But if you understand it, then you can begin leading them around. Distraction, everything is a distraction. Anything that points to the final goal they think they're going to get and away from the goal that you're going to get is distraction. Now, whether that's a verbal distraction and action, whether it's keeping them involved in something that's really not going to help them at the end of the day, whether it's giving them more convinces or telling them more lies, these are all distractions. And it's basically about directing them towards the carrot and away from the stick that's about to hit them. But this is the one that a lot of people never understand. Determination. People will not believe the lengths we will go to to get their money. If you have a bag full of shredded documents and enough scotch tape, you can figure out anything that you like. It's all about having the time and the inclination to do it. But it goes further than that. I found out and I didn't find this out until I started doing the real hustle and actually was pulling these scams for real that people will listen to what sounds like a completely preposterous idea and they will accept it because it's so preposterous that nobody would make this up. It's incredible. I tell them something, they go, well, yeah, I guess. I mean, why would you say that unless it was true? And then later when they're trying to explain to someone what happened to them, they look at them like they've got two heads. What do you mean that they were going to give you a car away for free? All you had to do was hand over this amount of money in an envelope. What are you talking about? Well, it was a promotion. Yeah, you're right. I feel like an idiot. So, but at the time when you're inside a scam, it feels and is completely different. So in order to talk about the termination and to show you the lengths that we've gone to in the past to beat casinos and to beat poker players and to beat people in any game of chance. My friend Jason England has a phenomenal collection. It's one I'm quite envious of is much, much bigger than mine. And he has access to many other collections around the world. He's an expert in car cheating. He's an expert in cons and scams. He's an expert in casino cheating. But I'm going to ask him to take you through some of the items that have been invented and used through time to beat these games just to show you the lengths that we'll go to to get a little money. Ladies and gentlemen, Jason England. Thank you very much. I have a lot of slides to show you because I think you will find very interesting. I don't have a lot of time so I'm going to go through them quickly. However, Paul and I will be over in the Q&A room after this if you have any questions for me or for him. So before I start showing you these things, I want to mention two points. Although I could talk about this forever, I decided to distill most casino cheating down into one two word phrase for you. And that phrase is information management. Information management, believe it or not, sums up how most casino cheating is executed. And managing the information comes in two forms. One is obtaining it when you're not supposed to have it, like marked cards for instance. You're getting information you're not supposed to have. And the other is actually manipulating or controlling the information itself, which a good example might be loaded dice. With loaded dice, you're predetermining what outcome is going to happen. And so I'll show you a couple of things that fall into both groups. I love this photo because it's almost self-explanatory for a lot of people. Instinctively, we know that mirrors don't belong inside poker chips. But that's exactly what you have here. This is an excellent example of obtaining information you're not supposed to have using a sneaky little device that hides in plain sight, sort of a Trojan horse of a sort. The one on the left with the H on top is an older version. It's a stack of chips that would sit in front of the dealer in a private poker game. And as the dealer dealt the cards around the table, he or she is looking right into that angled mirror and can figure out who's got the good cards at the table. The one on the right, the blue chip is actually designed to do essentially the same thing, except that it's held in the hand and it reflects the cards back to the dealer as he or she is dealing around the table. And again, tells you all of the information that you need to know as to who's got you beat. Now, you're not guaranteed to win every hand with a system like this. For instance, you could deal a wonderful hand to your opponent. But obviously, if that were to happen, because you've obtained information you're not supposed to have, you would just get out of his way and let him win all the money for that hand and then you would come back to very next hand. Again, sort of a Trojan horse concept here because this device is hiding in plain sight. Anytime you want, turn it over, set it on the table, looks like any other poker chip. Here's an example of a couple of more reflective devices. What we call shiners in the industry, sometimes they're built into the money itself. And as you can imagine, if you knew a dealer's whole card in the game of Blackjack, that could help you build a strategy. The device on the left, the Marlboro pack of cigarettes with the matchbook on top. It's actually in my collection at home. It works great. You open up the packet, pull a cigarette about three quarters of the way out, and you have an angled reflector that you would set on a Blackjack table and you can see the dealer's whole card every time he or she touch their whole card in the game of Blackjack. I can assure you, if you know the dealer's whole card, you can destroy that game. The device in between the dollar bill and the pack of cigarettes, the same type of thing. It's just not quite as cool. It's not been concealed or built into anything else. I assure you, that little device has won millions. It's designed to be set onto the table. You look right down into your hand and it gives you a tabletop view. And again, every time the dealer tucks his or her whole card, you can see what it is. Another example of a Shiner built into a ring, these things have been sold in gaffed gambling catalogs dating back to the early 1900s. Same concept. And here's the modern version. Stack of chips with a little pinhole camera built into it. Typically, this camera is communicating with someone off site, sitting in a van in a car up in a hotel room, what have you. And then they are getting that information back to you via a little Comtec earpiece. So they're sitting there whispering into a microphone in the hotel room. Dealer's got a ten of hearts. And you bet accordingly. This device is not in my collection, but it's actually in a friend's collection. And I mean, the battery lasts for hours. And again, you can crush a game with something that looks like it belongs on the table. Let's look at a couple more devices. You're all familiar with the dealing shoes they have out here on all the blackjack tables. Well, those shoes have been around forever. And in fact, in the 1800s, they looked like this. This is for the game of Pharaoh, which is no longer played in this country, but it was the most popular game in the 19th century. And this box is gaffed. It's actually gaffed gimmick, if you will, to tell you not the top card, which is sitting right there. But it's designed to tell you what the next card coming is. And it did this in a variety of ways. This particular one had a little needle that popped out the side of the box whenever the next card down was of a certain value. So this is 1800s technology, mid-1800s. This is 1920s technology. Exact same thing. They've made this into what they call a skeleton box. And it looks like because we can see inside it that there couldn't possibly be any hidden inner workings. I assure you there are. This box is also designed to allow you to know what the next card down is. And believe it or not to even be able to deal the second card down instead of the top card. This is 1940s technology. This is a Baccarat shoe from France, the Sabot. And I can assure you it has been messed with somewhat. This device was actually designed to add a hidden packet of cards onto a large group of cards. They shuffle up six decks, put it in the shoe, and as they're doing that a sneaky little packet comes out and lands on top. Again, 1940s technology. 1960s technology, we were peeking down into the shoes and determining what the next card coming was. This particular device was designed to beat the players, not to beat the casinos. Obviously if I know what the next card coming is and have a way of holding that card back and giving you a different card, I can beat you in no time. 1960s technology. This device won millions, by the way. And this is today. Today's technology uses what is apparently a clear, loose-site shoe. However, a hidden camera and this particular one is set up to show you what the top card of the deck is. But they also have one that uses OCR software and it tells you what the top card of the deck is. And you can utilize that information pretty much any way you want. The interesting thing about this is the dealer doesn't have to be in on it. So there are guys walking around the country with these things. They get blackjack games going and they give you a proposition that sounds too good to be true. They say hey why don't you be the casino? I'll just play blackjack against you and you deal to me. Bring your own cards. Sounds great. Sounds like you get to be put in the same position the casino is in. The only problem is your opponent knows every card you've got. This shoe is currently selling for about 50 grand. I assure you it's worth every penny and that just gives you a close-up look of the output. Again, the latest version of this is it's talking to you the whole time. So I don't know if you can see this. I can actually see it on this computer monitor. You might be able to see it on these monitors. Both of those cards are marked. Examples of information you're not supposed to have. The red one on the left is marked pretty much in the center of the card with sort of a goldish dot. You can probably see that. The farther back you are the easier it is to see. This is an example of a marking that would be put on by the players themselves. So this isn't something that the person that is running the game does. This would be something that I would go into the casino and I've got some of this sort of a waxy, almost like a lipstick substance called Dobb. And every time the dealer gives me a card, I pick it up, if it's a good card I put this little smudge on the back. Now you have to be playing in a game where you can still handle the cards but those games still exist. A lot of people think that you don't get to handle the cards in Vegas anymore. I assure you if you look around there are still some of those games. The blue card on the right has essentially the same smudge but it's a silver smudge right in the center of the card. This is an example of a card marking system that the players put on. This is another example of a card that was marked in this particular town for many many years. This was the standard poker card used in every poker room in Las Vegas for 40 years, something like that. They're both marked. The one on the right is probably easier to see if you look at the white circle in the center of the card on the right there are two shaded lines going right up the middle of the card. It's kind of tough to spot. I can see it because I've trained myself to see it. The one on the left has two shaded lines going up the card on the left side of the circle and down the card on the right side of that circle and these are designed to indicate the values. If you can't see it I can show it to you on a computer screen slightly better resolution you be able to pick it off right away. But these are marked cards designed to show you what happens in the poker room or could happen in the poker rooms. Last but not least we have an example of a marked card that actually came out of the factory. Someone got to the plates in a card factory. These cards were going to a casino in South Africa. You won't be able to see it even on the screen but the card on the left in the high upper left hand corner that one of those little circles is slightly different than the card on the right. This is an example of the links that these guys would go to. They actually got to the factory and miss marked to the plates and then use that information six months or a year down the road and this one's so much money that the people that caught it were the accountants. They're looking at the books going I don't know where the hell all our money went but it's not here today and it was because of this right here because of this card marking scam. Here's another example of some interesting links that people can go to. This is called luminous ink. If you put green ink a light green ink on a red playing card you need a filter to help you see it. By putting these red glasses on or in the case of the red contact lens on there you put those on and this green ink will actually pop out and you can see it someone not wearing the glasses although technically it's possible for them to see it more than likely won't be able to. This is a very old technology dates back to the 1920s. This is an interesting picture for the game of craps. Here's an example not of information we're secretly obtaining but of information we're actually controlling. Usually to control the information you have to control the gambling implements themselves. Every single one of those cubes is gimmicked in one way shape or form. This is just one example of a case that a cheater might travel with. They may travel with four or five of these cases and they can match up their dice to any dice anywhere in town. Here's an example of another way of controlling information. This dates back to the mid 80s and it's what we call a juice joint. It's an electromagnetic plate and a pair of dice that have been treated with ferrous material. You can pull whatever numbers you want depending on which way the polarity of the magnet is oriented. If you want sixes you hit the red button. If you want aces you hit the gray button. If you want threes or fours you have to swap the pair of dice but the concept is still the same. One button pulls fours one button pulls threes. Fives and twos work the same way. It's designed to be built into a table for the game of backgammon which is a very high money game in certain circles. Every single one of those dice is magnetic. Just goes to show you the different types of dice that can be gimmicked. Finally this is what we call a wall joint. Each one of those large copper wire bound things is designed to fit in between the studs in your in the walls of your house or in a business and you can actually by hitting a button that looks like a garage door opener you can create a massive electromagnetic wave that would fill up the entire side of a crap table and there's nothing to find. This actually dates back to the 1950s. Here we have a couple of interesting things these are called tap dice. Tap dice are movable slugs. By tapping the dice on one side that weight that you can see off in the corner that big little triangular shape of lead it will move from one side of the die to the other. If it moves down to the six you favor the ace. If it moves down to the ace you favor the six so on and so forth. If it's in the middle like that then the dice roll naturally. So kind of a cool little device. Here we show you the different types of stamps that cheaters would use to stamp their own dice with. For instance if you have a dice setup or a stamping machine like this you take a gaff to die you walk into a casino you figure out what numbers they're using. Let's say they're using the dice serial numbers are one two three today. These guys would get these numbers take a look at them and walk outside and use either a device like this in an apartment nearby or up in the hotel room or device like this which is a portable hot stamp machine they burn the same numbers onto their gimmick dice now they can walk into the casino and switch them pretty much at will. Pretty much a self-explanatory little tool here as we wrap this up this is another terrific example of the Trojan horse concept. We have a gimmick die that we've made in the hotel room how do we get it onto the table. Well that shows you right there how it gets onto the table it actually can hide inside a stack of chips until we're ready to go. This is same thing designed to hold two dice inside a hollowed out stack of chips. Last but not least I'll show you a couple of quick devices for hiding playing cards this dates back to the early 19th century I'm sorry mid 19th century was called a Keplinger holdout device very clever device if you've ever seen the movie Maverick someone is caught I believe it's Denver Pyle who was Uncle Jesse in the old Dukes of Hazard TV show I believe Denver Pyle is actually caught wearing one of these devices in the movie Maverick. There's a slightly more modern version of it but the same concept the card actually hides up the sleeve. This is called a short sleeve device designed for if you're wearing a kind of shirt like I'm wearing right now you slide that up your sleeve and under the guise of scratching your arm you can slip cards in and out of the game. Last but not least holdout devices have been built into wallets designed to secretly hold a card give it to you whenever you want and they have been built into the tables themselves this is a gin table that belongs to a friend of mine actually this is late 19th century technology the table was probably built in the fifties or the sixties and why bother with switching cards one at a time when you can switch a whole deck this is an antique cold deck machine designed to switch an entire deck of cards at will and the way it works is it expands your pants a little bit you drop the deck that you've been using into the pocket and you grab the deck that's pretty much handed to you right out of the machine itself all done with a slight inhalation that's all it takes. Last but not least the game of roulette the brass looking device on the left is called a ball knocker it was designed to be operated by a magnet and it would knock the ball off the track by inserting a little needle into the path of the ball not going to find these on a roulette wheel anywhere in this town today but they were built into wheels into the in the 1930s 40s and 50s the ball there that you see is a magnetic steel cord ball can be pulled off the track whenever the operator wanted and a little orange things there called ball blockers they were actually designed to go into the frets on a roulette wheel and prevent the ball from landing in those frets depending on how you set it up you can make a wheel that should have 36 slots on it only have say 34 slots on it or 32 slots finally some communication devices from the 1980s I can assure you these days communications a lot more simple but as you can see they've been built into hats they've been built into boots shoes just about anything you want this particular device was potted in copper to prevent it from giving off any RF signals this is in the mid-80s guys these these folks were thinking about this stuff even back then trying to avoid detection and last but not least we got some slot devices these were called light wands they were used to trick the slot machines into paying out all of the quarters that were inside the machines these devices were called kickstands they did the same thing they basically held open the coin hopper and here we have the most modern tool of all this device was seized from a friend of mine about a year ago it was he actually did a year in jail over this device what happened is you put it together you inserted it into the bill validator on any slot machine in the state you hit that little button there and it would basically counterfeit the signal that the bill validator sent to the slot machines central processor that said hey we just received a hundred dollar bill go ahead and give this guy a hundred dollars worth of credit so he's faking that hundred dollar bill signal put the device in hit the button hundred bucks two hundred three hundred four hundred five hundred up to nine hundred dollars and then he would hit cash out and it gives him a ticket worth nine hundred dollars that's probably the device that would frighten the gaming control board more than any of the other devices I've shown you because it's current and it actually works and finally we have a chip cup once more with the Trojan horse concept this was designed to actually steal the money right off the table in conjunction with a dealer you just hand it back and forth and before you know it you've got all the money the chips fit up inside it but you don't put five dollar chips in you put hundred dollar chips and that's it thank you very much if you have any questions come see me alright we're not going to switch the camera over we're going to do a little show game here if you're interested in seeing the free show game we will do it in the Q&A for you but basically all balls down to never give a sucker and even break which is well it's a model to live by but it's not a great one protection I'm just gonna finish very quickly on the rules of protection and it's very very simple if you want to protect people you have to understand that experience and this is from nineteen is this from 1894 experiences demonstrated the ignorance of the public with regard to the capabilities of trickery is the principal factor in all problems connected with every kind of deception if the public only knew a little more in this respect a thousand and one quackery's my favorite word which flourished in our midst could not exist that was John Neville masculine in sharps and flats 1894 and basically it's all about knowledge understanding and acceptance if you find out a way to be conned share the information if you find out a way that your company's vulnerable share the information knowledge is the only defense against cons and scams they constantly ask me if I'm teaching people how to be a con artist by doing this on television con artists already know how to con you it's the fact that you won't recognize it that makes it a con if I can spread the word I will kill the scam 100% of the time understanding and believing that anything is possible and stop blaming the victims if we can do that people will report more of these crimes and the more crimes are reported the more we can shut them down and finally admit the possibility of deception and take action to prevent it how many companies just shut their eyes how many companies just say there's nothing wrong and will actually kill the messenger for telling them that they have a problem if we can get people to turn around on that that creates the industry that I think everybody in this room can be part of and it's the industry that is just waiting to come alive it's already starting people are really starting to use pen testers it's already starting it's been around for a while we just have to give them a service that they can trust but basically if you know enough if you learn enough and if you keep an open mind when the time comes there is a really good possibility that you will feel the hustle you'll know that something's wrong just a week ago I got a Twitter message from a very good friend of mine saying there's a guy saying some really bad stuff about you click here and I knew I knew right away this has to be a scam but how many people would click on that right away nobody in this room I would assume but probably everybody outside of this convention center would consider clicking on that link but learn to recognize them then spread the word thank you very much for listening thank you your time we'll see you in the Q&A