Russian Hackers Slot Machines

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Casinos at a Loss Due to Russian Slot Machine Hack Back in 2014, accountants at Lumiere Palace Casino in St. Louis spotted something awry with the slot machines at the casino. The government-approved software powering these machines provides the house a fixed mathematical advantage, so that casinos can be sure of how much they will be able to. The Russian syndicate most recently struck in Peru, a security consultant to slot-makers told a group of U.S. Regulators at a Las Vegas conference Thursday at the Luxor organized by Gaming.

In early July 2014, Lumiere Place accountants noticed that several slot machines from their casino had gone mad for a couple of days. The certified software gives casinos fixed edge so that casinos know how much they earn in a long run, let it be 7,129 cents for each dollar. But on June 2 and 3, several slot machines at Lumiere Place had paid much more than they had received, though no major jackpot had been awarded. In the gambling industry lingo, it is called negative hold. As the casino software is not affected by any fits of madness, the only explanation for that was cheating.
The casino security service checked their video archives and identified the reason, a black-haired middle-aged man in a polo with a square brown bag. Unlike other con men, he wasn't obviously cheating on their slot machines. He played only at old-fashioned models produced by the Australian Aristocrat Leisure manufacture. He was playing played, pushing the buttons, like in any other game, furtively holding his iPhone close to the slot’s screen.
He would leave the slot machine, then return back to it for another try and win the bank. The player would make a bet from $20 to $60 and win about $1300; after than make a cashout and go to another slot machine to repeat the whole pattern. He won about $21.000 in 2 days. The only suspicious thing about him was the way he would hold his index finger above the “Spin” button; the man would hold it above the button for long enough before finally pushing it. Common players don’t do anything like that.
On June 9, Lumiere Place shared what they had found out with the Missouri Gambling Comission, which issued a warning for the state. After that, several casinos discovered that they had been tricked the same way, though in particular cases there had been some other players. And, in every case, the players had been holding their phones in front of the slot machines' screens.
Having examined car rental records, Missouri authorities identified the player from Lumiere Place as Murat Bliev, a 37-year-old Russian citizen. Bliev returned back to Moscow on June 6 and was sent back to the USA by the criminal enterprise he was a member of, based in Saint-Petersburg and making a specialty of worldwide slot scamming, soon after his arrival. It was a serious mistake of the enterprise, quietly making money by cracking some of the most valued algorithms in the gambling industry, to send him back.
From Russia with Fraud
Russia has become a nest of criminals hacking slot machines since 2009, when gambling was virtually restricted in the country. Vladimir Putin believed this step would reduce the influence of Georgian criminal enterprises. Casinos had to sell all their slot machines with great discounts to any buyers they could find. Some of these slot machines were purchased by the perpetrators who wanted to know how to upload new games to old boards. Naturally, some of these slot machines were purchased but Murat Bliev’s bosses who wanted to find vulnerabilities in slots’ source code.
In 2011, central and eastern Europe casinos registered a number of incidents when the slots produced by the Austrian developer Novomatic paid unbelievably huge sums. Novomatic’s engineers couldn’t find any evidence of manipulations made to their slots and decided that the perpetrators had found out the way to predict slots’ behavior. ‘It is possible to detect some “patterns” in the game outcome by focused and prolonged observation of particular games’, reported the company to its clients in February 2011.
Such tracing is expensive. The game outcomes are generated by pseudorandom number generators which are designed to give unpredictable results. Government regulators certify all algorithms before they are implemented in casinos.
But the name contains this word “pseudo” which means that generated numbers are not truly random. They are created with code instructions so they are a bit deterministic. Input data depends on the current slot state. Input data may vary in different periods of time because it comes from the internal clock. It means, that if hackers know how the pseudorandom number generators work, they have to analyze how the slot works before they can find out the patterns. It takes time and computer power so it is impossible to do in a casino as it will attract securities’ attention.
Lumiere Place case showed that Murat Bliev and his companions had found the way to overcome this obstacle. Darin Hoke, who was the head of surveillance at L’Auberge du Lac Casino Resort in Lake Charles, Louisiana, carried out his own investigation. Having talked to his colleagues who had reported unusual slots’ behavior, and examined photos taken by surveillance cameras, he identified 25 possible perpetrators who had been working in casinos around the world, from California to Romania and Macau. Hoke checked out hotel records and found out that 2 of Bliev’s companions from Saint Louis had stayed in the USA and had been heading to the Pechanga Resort & Casino in Temecula, California.
On July 14, 2014, California Department of Justice agents apprehended one of them at Pechanga and confiscated 4 mobile phones and $6.000 in cash. This Russian citizen wasn’t charged; his current location is unknown.
The mobile phone from Pechanga together with investigation results from Missouri and Europe revealed some key details of the case. According to Willy Allison, a security consultant from Las Vegas who has been tracking the group of Russian hackers for several years, the perpetrators use their phones to record several dozens of spins at the game they want to hack. They upload the video to technicians from Saint-Petersburg, who analyze and identify the patters of slot machines. Finally, the team from Saint-Petersburg sends a list of temporary markers to specially developed mobile application installed on the perpetrator’s mobile phone. The markers make the phone vibrate in a quarter of second before the moment when he should press the “spin” button.
‘The reaction speed of a human being is about a quarter of second, that’s why they use these settings’, says Allison, the founder of the annual game protection conference. The temporary markers don’t always work as expected but still they let the hackers to win much more than normally. Some perpetrators can win more than $10.000 per day but they try not to cashout more than $1.000 from a single slot machine not to attract attention. A team of 4 men, working in different casinos, can earn up to $250.000 per week.
Reusable Business
Since there are no slot machines in Murat Bliev’s home country, he didn’t stay in Russia for a long time after returning back from St. Louis. He visited the USA for 2 times during 2014; his second visit started on December 3. He headed from the airport straight to St. Charles, where he met 3 other men trained to win at Mark VI Aristocrat slot machines: Ivan Gudalov, Igor Larenov, and Yevgeniy Nazarov. They planned to spend the next days “attacking” various casinos in Missouri and western Illinois.
It was a mistake for Bliev to come back. On December 10, as he was spotted in Hollywood Casino in St. Louis, the four perpetrators were arrested. As Bliev and his companions had worked in several states, they were accused of fraud. The formal charges became the first serious challenge for the team from Saint-Petersburg. It was the first time when one of their members faced prosecution.
Bliev, Gudanov, and Lavrenov, Russian citizens, confessed to the crime and were sentenced to 2 years in prison with the following deportation. Nazarov, a citizen of the Republic of Kazakhstan, granted religious asylum in the USA in 2013, is still waiting for his sentence, which means he is cooperating with the government. Aristocrat representatives states that one of four defendants hasn’t been sentenced yet as he continues to assist the FBI with the investigation.
The information provided by Nazarov may be hopelessly outdated. Two years has passed since the arrest date so the team from Saint-Petersburg has become more cautious. Some of their tricks were discovered during the previous year, when Singaporean authorities arrested and prosecuted a group of hackers. Radoslav Skubnik, a Czech citizen and a member of the team, disclosed some details of the financial structure of the criminal enterprise (90% of total income goes to Saint-Petersburg) and their tactics. ‘They put a mobile phone in a vest pocket, mask it with a net, not to hold it in their hands’, says Alisson. Darrin Hoke says he received a message saying that they send the videos via Skype so they don’t have to leave slots to send the videos.
It appears, that the criminals were prosecuted only in 2 cases, in Missouri and Singapore, and there are more known cases when they were caught and kicked off particular casinos. The team from Saint-Petersburg continues to operate. In the past 3 month, 3 casinos in Peru reported they had been cheated by Russian gamblers playing at old Novomatic Coolfire slot machines.
It seems that the enterprise from Saint-Petersburg will continue to flourish. There is no simple way to change the slot machines. Hoke says Aristocrat, Novomatic and other manufactures whose slot machines have been hacked would have to recall and change them with something else but they will never do that. Aristocrat reported there were no flaws in their slot machines and those machines had been designed and certified with full accordance to the strict technical standards. In the same time, many casinos can’t afford buying updated slot machines protected from hackers. While old hackable slot machines are still in use and popular among the clients, it will be more profitable for casinos to use them accepting occasional losses caused by hackers.
Thus, casino security service has no choice but to keep an eye on the indirect signs of fraud. A finger hovering above the “spin” button may appear the only sign to tell that hackers from Saint-Petersburg are about to win again.

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The hacker with the nickname “Alex”, who lives in St. Petersburg, claims to have found a way to hack a slot machine and get huge winnings. He says that it’s really possible to hack a slot machine, doesn’t matter if it is online or a physical slot. Also he says that they bring him 250 thousand dollars a week. Alex also states that it easy to hack a slot machine of one particular developer, Aristocrat Leisure Limited, and even plans to sell them his algorithm of hacking, for millions of course. However, the company reacted very calmly to his statement.

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The Russian hacker told all this in an interview with the American technical journal Wired. He declares that for 8 years he has won money in various online casinos, turning them for himself into personal ATMs. It is not clear why, having such a colossal source of income, he decided to get rid of it. It’s more like that he does not know how to hack slot machine systematically. He tries to ensure developers that he can and tries to get money from them.

Let’s see if there is a way to hack slot machine and what exactly Alex invented.

How to beat slot machine according to Alex’s theory?

The identity of Alex is not established. He calls himself a programmer, a mathematician and a graduate of the Academy of the Federal Security Service of Russia, naturally, without providing this evidence. Symbol crossword puzzle clue. The hacker also says that he once worked at the military university in St. Petersburg, specializing in teaching cryptography and hardware hacking.

Hacker told to American journal Wired about his own unique method of reverse engineering of the RNG. If to simplify, he says that he has uncovered a way of generating random numbers in Aristocrat slots and knows how they will behave. Also he can hack Aristocrat slots in land based casinos.

To hack slot machine, Alex needs an agent network

Also, Alex talked about his own network of agents, allegedly legion, and who work all over the world, shooting video with the help of mobile gadgets about the work of a variety of slots. It is noteworthy that he does have “agents”, and four people from this list in the US already have a criminal record for fraud.

Video from various gambling places of the planet were collected and immediately analyzed in Russia. The hacker claims that his observations made it possible to reveal when payments in games will be at their maximum. In fact, he is sure that he has found a method how to hack slot machine.

The results of the video analysis were immediately sent to the “agent” through a special application along with the winning strategy of the game. And as a result, the “agents” won, collecting a common bank for 250 thousand dollars a week.

The best success “agents” were those who conducted the shooting of slots as imperceptibly as possible. For this work, people were specially selected who understood the importance of acting secretly, knew how to behave correctly so as not to cause suspicion. Most of the “agents” of the hacker look confident and respectable. But even in case of arrest for unauthorized filming in a casino hacker guarantees them protection and legal support.

Alex decided to close such organized and profitable business, which brought him income for 8 years. The hacker demanded from the Australian developer of the slot machines, Aristocrat, several million for his method of slot machine hacking.

Aristocrat: to hack slot machine in the Internet or casino is impossible

Russian Hackers Slot Machines Jackpots

Aristocrat Leisure Limited has been working in the gambling industry for more than 60 years. Company which is developing and maintaining land based and virtual casinos, confirmed it has received a letter from hacker. In it, Alex reports that he knows how to hack slot machine of the developer, and therefore requires money for the non-disclosure of this information.

The hacker offers not just to give his way of slot machine hacking, but also promises to turn off the agent network.

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Alex himself calls his proposal a deal that will allow to stop compromising the Aristocrat trademark. As he believes, this service is estimated in an eight-digits amount. As a gesture of goodwill, he not only tells how to hack the slot machines, but also helps developers to eliminate weaknesses to make the product inaccessible to hacking.

To confirm the seriousness of their knowledge, hacker sent the developer a breakdown of his pseudo-generator. With its help he can hack the 50 Lions machine of the company or Heart of Gold. To persuade Aristocrat Leisure Limited to make a decision in its favor, Alex threatens to surrender information to competitors. Also he can simply put their workings on the network. Such a move, in his opinion, will lead to the fact that everyone can hack slot machine.

The way to hack slot machine by Aristocrat is a myth

In the fall of 2016, Alex contacted a representative of Aristocrat Leisure Limited. Head of Compliance, Tracy Elkerton, talked to the hacker on the phone.

She expressed interest in a method that allows Alex to win a slightly larger amount of money.

“It is very unlikely that Aristocrat will pay for information,” Tracy said. “It’s just not how we work. We have developed a solution to promote our products, and we are comfortable with this solution. ”

A company spokesman said that Aristocrat Leisure Limited has zero tolerance for unethical behavior. And this means that no one will pay a million for “help in eliminating weak points of slots”. Moreover, Alex did not provide any actual evidence that his way to hack slot machine works.

Alex’s attitude to online casinos and players

Alex is cynical enough about the casino and the culture of gambling. Gamblers are stupid he thinks. He calls himself Robin Hood, who takes money from the rich (meaning the casino). But he didn’t say a word about how the network Robin Hood helps poor people. Here are a few quotes from his Wired interview.

“My job is simply to help myself and people to take money from the casino. Just a small counterbalance to the global gaming system, where the casino always wins. ”

“Most gambling seemed to me nothing more than a tax on stupidity.”

“My agents are just gamers, like everyone else. Only they are able to make better predictions in the stakes. Yes, this ability is achieved thanks to my technology, it’s true. But why should this be illegal? At a basic level, it’s like using a calculator to count faster and more accurately, instead of doing it all in your head. ”

“Sometimes I fantasize about just giving away my way to hack slot machine to people. This would lead to a “zombie apocalypse”: equipped with information and software, player using a simple smartphone will be able to turn slot machine into ATM. ”

Conclusion: it is impossible to beat slot machine in an unfair way

The story of Alex and his way to hack slot machine made a lot of noise. But it didn’t affect Aristocrat Company.

The developer’s representatives admitted that a technique was found that slightly increases the player’s advantage. But obviously not so much to worry about it and to hide the way from the public.

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Further, Alex plans to apply with a similar proposal to IGT, since he claims that he understood the algorithm of the RNG of their Atronic slot machine. However, as in the case of Aristocrat, hacker does not have any evidence of systemic major gains.

All this history leads to a natural conclusion: it is impossible to predict the algorithm of the RNG operating on licensed slot machines. In addition, in each new slot developers improve the generator and its protection.