There is absolutely no reason to worry about being handcuffed in the middle of a blackjack pit in Las Vegas for counting cards. Counting cards in Las Vegas is not against the law. Not only is card counting not illegal in Las Vegas, there are plenty of old-timers on the strip that will tell you that it was people like Edward Thorpe, the grandfather of card counting, that helped build Las Vegas into what it is today.

That being said, many casinos frown on moving your bet with the count, and being private businesses, they have every right to remove you from the floor and trespass you from the property. This is actually a two-edged sword, as the surveillance department will then send your picture out to many other properties. Most properties will then ask you to leave often before you’ve even made your first bet.

Can I get in trouble if caught?

What can and does get players arrested, especially after a couple of drinks, is not complying with security. If you find yourself in the unenviable position of being “walked”, don’t say anything and don’t touch anyone.

This isn’t the movies, they aren’t going to take you upstairs just to throw you down them. They just want to get you colored up and out the door with the least aggravation. But… should you touch one of them or perhaps even say something a bit hastily that you will regret in the morning, you will quickly find yourself on the floor in handcuffs with the police on their way.

In some cases, you might not even be asked to leave. Casinos have long ago discovered that just because you are attempting to count cards doesn’t mean that you are actually very good at it. Most novice card counters lose at the same rate as regular gamblers.

Casinos don’t have the people or the patience to watch your play for long, so they’ll ask you not to play blackjack anymore, or sometimes any table games, and leave you to the slots and video poker on the off chance you’re a degenerate gambler who happens to know a bit about card counting.

What Is Card Counting, And Why Isn’t It Illegal In Las Vegas?

Card counting isn’t some sort of mental gymnastics that requires a Ph.D. It’s just keeping track of the high cards and low cards and betting more when there are lots of high cards. But this only works as the house advantage on Blackjack is quite low.

When casinos change the rules in their favor, you’ll need to bet more when the number of high cards are in your favor to overcome the new house odds. And some rule changes, like only paying 6/5 on blackjacks, are very difficult to overcome.

Using what cards have already been dealt to inform your betting and playing strategy is perfectly legal, but only when done without mechanical or electronic aid. People like Ken Uston built wearable computers as far back as the 1970s to try and beat the game. But the courts made clear that while using your brain was fine, outside aid wasn’t.

An interesting aside is that the Nevada Supreme Court has also found that using a dealer’s exposed hole card to inform your decisions isn’t illegal if you can see it unaided and, of course, the dealer isn’t showing it to you as an act of collusion.

Some things that will get you arrested include switching cards, adding/subtracting from your bet after the cards are dealt, using a computer or a phone to aid your play, using devices like a prism or camera to catch the dealer’s hole card, any sort of collusion with the dealer such as being overpaid on purpose or the dealer flashing you the next card before it’s dealt.

A Brief History Of Beatings and Blackjack In Las Vegas

When Bugsy Siegel opened the Flamingo Hilton in 1946, the population of Las Vegas was around twenty thousand. The mob would run this backward western town for the next three decades. By 1980 when most of the mob influence was on the wane, the town had grown to a metro-size area of over 500,000.

As early as the 1950’s there are books by people who are beginning to lay out basic blackjack strategy and hint at counting. “Playing Blackjack to Win” was published 5 full years before Thorp’s seminal work “Beat the Dealer”. But Thorp’s computer-aided research caught the whole country’s imagination and even made the New York time best seller charts. 

As one might imagine, mathematically minded folks trying to beat the casinos and the mob weren’t a match made in heaven and much mayhem ensued. Thorp has even claimed that the mob tried to kill him in Las Vegas a few years after his book came out.

Ken Uston and a great many other card counters, some skilled and others not so much would also be on the wrong end of mob beatings over the years. Casinos often enforced their own justice up through most of the 1970s.  And this is where many people’s fears of card counting being illegal or punishable come from.

Ironically, after a short-lived panic, the casino managers up and down the strip realized that their now-packed blackjack tables were filled with people that believed the game to be beatable but lacked the skill to actually do it.  This belief that blackjack was vulnerable would fill blackjack tables and Las Vegas hotel rooms for decades to come.

Casinos would still make some changes to make the game a bit less favorable, first two decks, then as many as eight were added. The cut card was moved up so not as many cards were dealt out, rules like Five Card Charlie and surrender became a thing of the past. Not only did this lessen the pool of folks who could count cards profitably, but also the number of beatings that needed to be doled out.

The days of beatings are long gone, and about the only vestige left of the mob in Las Vegas is a museum downtown. The thrill of card counting and taking your shot at bringing down the house means there are still some who will risk it. And while the casino may ask you to leave if they believe you are counting cards, honestly, you are getting off lightly. No handcuffs and no bouncing down long flights of stairs.

We sit down with financial crime investigator, Jinisha Bhatt, to discuss the link between money laundering and human trafficking, the role of technology, and the importance of collaborative relationships.

When people talk about the ramifications of financial crime like money laundering, they often mention the impact to the financial system, or to a business, but you also talk about the ‘very human cost of financial crime’. Could you expound?

When I first began to investigate financial crime, what struck me most about incidents of money laundering, corruption, and human trafficking was how they serve to undermine legitimate businesses and governments, and in turn, society.  

You see the starkest impact of a corrupt, fincrime-ridden society on the most marginalized of groups. Indeed, there’s a direct correlation between the rate of fincrime and violent crime.

What is the link between money laundering, and, for example, human trafficking or exploitation? What non-financial impact would the eradication of financial crime have on society and humanity?

As financial inclusion is the means to a more peaceful, equitable and just society, the eradication of fincrime would enable an equal distribution of public and private wealth – away from the underbellies of the launderers and corrupt officials to the public.  

In turn, this would mean better social services, safer cities, better education, and a higher rate of social and economic mobilisation. 

The biggest driver of a prosperous nation is not only wealth, but equal and fair wealth distribution.

It is estimated that less than 1% of criminal proceeds from human trafficking and exploitation flowing through the banking system ever gets detected, and of that only 0.8% of traffickers are prosecuted – while a mere 0.2% of victims are rescued annually. What are the reasons for these weak numbers, especially the 1% detection rate?

Trafficking is a transient crime. If institutions fail to detect trafficking activity while it’s happening in a specific location, it is too late to pass on any intelligence to regulators and law enforcement. To improve detection measures, financial institutions could be more focused on creating non-transactional detection rules, such as frequent changes to device metadata and device language, frequent credit card cancellations, and frequent use of certain keywords in transaction memos. To strengthen intel-gathering measures, financial institutions could also:

• Geomap frequently-used ATMIDs and/or branch locations
• Run adverse media searches on client usernames/aliases
• Conduct regular Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT) investigations on suspicious users and their associations.  

From first-hand experience, I am convinced that the biggest reason we fail at prosecuting criminals and rescuing victims is a lack of collaboration between, and within, the public and private sectors. One of the major explanations for a lack of collaboration are some very stringent and outdated privacy regulations. For example, many large institutions with substantial data sets work with legacy systems. There are many sophisticated AI and DLT-based tools that enable safe data-sharing in an encrypted manner.  

Another reason we struggle to rescue victims is a lack of victim-centered services. Many survivors struggle to find safe and prolonged housing, especially when they struggle with addiction. The lack of readily available and survivor-centered services contributes to a high revictimization rate. It is said that an average survivor is revictimized between 5-13 times before they are emancipated. And in this process, victims are financially excluded by institutions, especially when their credit rating and identity has been compromised by their perpetrators.

Could you talk a little more about your work in locating traffickers, in particular through the use of technology?

As a financial crime investigator, I came to realize that the industry’s approach to anti-trafficking investigations is fragmented. Data suggests that many countries have identified less than 1% of human trafficking victims in their jurisdiction. The rate of prosecution in many jurisdictions is also about 1%. My goal is to leverage technology and data to bridge the intelligence gap, and take in as many survivors as possible, while supporting law enforcement investigations. My team of volunteers and I implement various data, geomapping, and OSINT tools.  

For example, in partnership with data and machine learning engineers, we scrape escort ads on active escort forums in individual cities, then process the data, and deploy machine learning tools to predict where the most egregious of trafficking activity might be occurring.  

We then partner with Anti Money Laundering and OSINT investigators to create intel files on trafficking entities with a high-risk score.  

We then use geomapping tools to cluster and map the most illicit trafficking networks so that our field intelligence volunteers can approach victims and extract them in a safe manner. We also send our intelligence files to law enforcement organizations, financial regulators and non-profit partners.  

Would you say this unique approach to financial crime investigations helps or hinders your work at times? What more can be done to educate institutions on the link between financial crime and human trafficking and terrorist financing?

I would say that this approach is a timely reminder that we need to look beyond a series of transactions and financial patterns when investigating financial crime. Often, the most profitable crimes are also the most egregious and vile, and financial institutions simply cannot combat them single-handedly. It’s not just a matter of getting ‘more education’; it’s about nuanced and scenario-based education from lived-experience experts. It is high time that institutions worked in tandem with survivors, governments, victim services, forensic services, law enforcement, and of course, each other.

You have recently shifted into the crypto sphere, is there a difference in the types of financial crime, or ease of financial crime execution, between crypto and tradfi?

My primary motivation to transition into crypto investigations was traceability and speed of transactions. Before I made the transition, I invested in a blockchain forensics designation and found myself beguiled by the infrastructure and the crypto compliance community at large. While many financial crime typologies are the same in defi and tradfi, as an investigator, I may have more transactional data at my disposal in the crypto space by virtue of distributed ledgers and block explorers. I also find myself conducting faster and proactive investigations while collaborating with other compliant crypto platforms.

What part does technology play in the detection of financial crime? As criminals continue to use increasingly advanced techniques, how can organizations stay one step ahead of the international networks to combat financial crime?

I believe our biggest challenge is the lack of effective and responsible info-sharing among organizations.

If we aim to be proactive, we must work together and deploy the best technology that is interoperable and collaborative. Some of the best use cases of predictive AI I have seen have been deployed in the anti-financial crime sector. They were largely successful when multiple financial institutions forged collaborative partnerships to combat crimes like human trafficking.

If you’re interested in more insights from industry insiders and thought leaders, check out one of our interviews from our Fintech Spotlight Interview series below.

By

Jody Houton
Content Manager at IDnow
Connect with Jody on LinkedIn