Cybercrime Cops Catch Crafty Computerized Casino Criminals

The days of casino robbery caper movies may be over as reality demonstrates it’s not rappelling down skyscrapers dressed in black, nor using explosives to break into the vaults, that are destined to be the methods of future would-be criminals set on robbing these ever more common pleasure palaces. As the cybercrime cops discovered this week at a casino in Bulgaria there’s a new threat that the gaming industry will have to face up to if it doesn’t want to lose out even more to the internet competition.

Cybercrime is often portrayed as the hacking of server farms or individual PCs or phones, the phishing attempts online the most common form encountered, however those enforcing Bulgarian gambling laws found a gang had instead of targeting online gambling in Bulgaria actually got into the coding of gaming machines in casinos scattered around the country. The cybercriminals remotely connected to the machines, changed the coding and won massively playing on those machines. The future is here.

Cybercrime Dystopia Heralded In Bulgarian Arrests

Now the police aren’t saying how the arrested gang connected to the machines (they termed it “innovative”) but could it be that to shave ever more off their costs newer gaming machines are built around cheap motherboards with standardized features like NFC or Bluetooth which this cybercrime gang accessed? It seems plausible but casino operators aren’t that stupid or cheap, are they? Shame caper movies will now be of furtive men fiddling in their pockets, I rather liked the Ocean’s 11 series.