A Czech national has been jailed for 22 months in Singapore for his part in an elaborate scam to defraud slot machines in Singapore’s Resorts World Sentosa and Marina Bay Sands casinos.
According to leading Singaporean news website Straits Times, Rodoslav Skubnik, 40, admitted to three charges of cheating under the Casino Control Act. Skubnik’s alleged Russian accomplices Vladislav Logachev, 40, and Andrei Egorov, 33, are yet to face trial for their part in the scams.
Skubnik was part of a syndicate, which operated in land-based casinos in Singapore, Macau and the United States. He would work as part of a team to gather information about specific slot machines using his smart phone. he recorded the patterns of the slot machines during real money play. This information would then be taken back to a secret address and uploaded to an unknown server and decoded to reveal potential winning patterns.
Armed with the information decoded from the servers, a Skubnik or another syndicate member would return to the same slot machines, and with the help of the data on their smart phones, would be alerted to when the machines were due to pay out. According to court documents, Skubnik and his colleagues were trained in Russia on how to defraud the slot machines.
Over a relatively short period the scammers were able to amass over $120,000 (€108,235 or £89,492), which has since been recovered by Singaporean police.
It is not clear how the syndicate was rumbled, but it is believed that the casinos targeted became suspicious when the men kept coming in and walking away with huge payouts.