WGPC Audience Votes Mickey Mouse Cam Top Scam

Attendees at this year's World Game Protection Conference have selected their top scam of 2025. The audience voted for a camera hidden in a Mickey Mouse t-shirt as their top ruse at the annual Las Vegas conference. A couple from Kazakhstan conned their way into winning $800, 000 with the aid of a minute hidden spy cam.

The conference dubbed the scam the "Holey T-shirt Cam Scam". The pair initially came to Australia in October, where they started playing Mississippi Stud and Texas Hold'em at the Barangaroo casino in New South Wales. At first, they used a cell phone placed on the table next to the shuffle to get a hold of images of the cards. However, a streak of unlikely wins roused suspicion amongst the staff, and the casino proceeded to ban cell phones from the surface of the table.

That didn't put an end to the couple's efforts, though. They soon returned, this time with the now-infamous hidden t-shirt camera. Another suspicious run of wins alerted security, who used a surveillance camera to figure out what was going on. Conspicuously, the woman wore the same Mickey Mouse top every day. Zooming in on the t-shirt revealed a tiny hole through which a hidden camera was spying on the game. 

New South Wales police soon arrested the duo, who were found to have been streaming the games and using hidden earpieces to communicate. The investigation is still ongoing, and it is understood that another person may also have been involved in the scam. The couple's passports have been taken away, and the husband is in jail, while the wife is under house arrest.

It is down to chance that the arrest was able to take place at all, as the couple had stopped playing and were planning to travel back to Kazakhstan with their winnings. However, in a moment of hubris, the couple returned to the scene of the crime for one last celebratory dinner, where they were finally caught by surveillance.

Attendees voted the dramatic scam as the best of the year to close out the industry conference. The tongue-in-cheek event has become a real favorite for participants, although it does, of course, have a serious point. WGPC founder Willy Allison noted that the hidden camera trend is one that casinos must be on the lookout for. Tech developments like AI are now proving useful in detecting criminal behavior at both real-world and online casinos.

In 2024, a similar incident occurred in Paris, when a secret camera was used to stream a game so that another person in a car in the casino parking lot could analyze the dealer's cards and communicate advice back to the player. These are cases that casino staff need to be vigilant about.

Bill Zender, a casino consultant speaking with Willy Allison at the convention, shared some good advice on how these kinds of scams can be intercepted. Inserting a security card is a good method, one that helped in catching the cheaters at Bangaroo casino. Another good method involves programming systems to automatically drop a card under the community cards.

The conference audience also voted on their favorite runner-up scams. In second place, they chose an incident involving marked Pai Gow tiles at the Mohegan Sun Casino & Resort in Connecticut. Shamar Miller, a security analyst at the casino, was there to speak about the scam. The tiles were marked with a small piece of sandpaper glued to the thumb. 

Over the course of the game, a group of ten to fifteen people marked over 32 boxes of tiles. The alarm was raised when the level of success at the table became suspicious. One person was arrested, at which point he was discovered to have more than twenty player cards from Boston and around the East Coast.

Following the scam, the casino amended its protocols for running the game. Staff now wash the tiles and use a UV light to check them for scratches. A camera is also used to further examine the fronts and backs of the tiles. 

In third place, the audience picked a collusion scam that took place in Macau last July. Three people were arrested after a dealer and two players worked together on past posting. The scam went under the radar for a number of weeks and was only discovered during a routine surveillance scan at the casino. 

During that time, the trio was able to get their hands on more than $250, 000. Commenting on the incident, Allison said that the large amount of side bets in baccarat makes past posting "juicier" due to the odds. Late betting is considered cheating, as information unavailable to those who made earlier bets offers an unfair advantage. 

Other scams included in the top five were card marking and the use of counterfeit chips. The speaker noted that Mississippi Stud is a game particularly vulnerable to card marking. According to one study, if all cards in Mississippi Stud are marked, players can attain a 270% advantage over the ante. In Asia, the usage of counterfeit chips is a persistent problem, which incurred losses of up to $365, 000 in South Korea last spring.

Attention was also drawn to the recent trend in strong-armed robberies. Several incidents were detailed in which large sums of cash had been stolen from private gaming rooms and cashiers' cages. It's an area that could do with more vigilance and enhanced security, although when weapons become involved, the safety of staff is ultimately more important.

While these scams all took place at brick-and-mortar casinos, there are also online scams to be wary of. Players should make sure that they are playing at safe, licensed platforms by consulting expert guides, like those found at Casino.org. As a rule of thumb, if a site looks too good to be true, it probably is!

Conversely, online casinos also face a risk of being scammed by players. For operators, that means that anti-money laundering checks and know your customer protocols must be robust. Detecting fraud is a time-consuming process, further hampered by monitoring systems that raise false positives.

Online operators should look out for key fraudulent behaviors. These include bonus fraud and the use of multiple accounts to bypass limits. Gnoming is when a number of players coordinate their accounts to manipulate outcomes or distribute winnings. Another common scam is chargeback fraud, whereby players dispute charges to get their cash back.