Scams at the pokies

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Winning the pokies is said to be as unlikely as being struck by lightning. Some have tried to cheat the machines with infamous pokie scams.

Every day across the country, punters leave millions of dollars in the nation's casinos.

And in every place where there is a pokie machine, you could almost guarantee two things:

1. It will make more money than it loses.
2. Someone is really thinking of ways to "crack the code" and get the jackpot.

But is there a code? A scam? A technique, legal or illegal, to cracking poker machines?

In the late 1990s, the Department of Gaming and Racing estimated $115 million was being ripped of from pokie takings by staff every year.

It's no wonder we are so obsessed: 2 per cent of us are problem gamblers. Of the 8 million poker machines in the world, one in every 10 are in NSW. Every day, pokie players are losing more than $60 million Australia-wide, a whopping $22 billion per year.

While pokies claim to return 87 per cent of that, you might never be the one to see it.

Greg Coman from National Association of Gambling Studies described the odds.

"You've probably got as much chance of winning the machine as you do being hit by lightning," Mr Coman said.

But scams do happen. Former Manager of Star City, Mark Wells, has seen them all.

"There are people even now, out there, finding ways to rip machines off and teams going around to find the jackpots," Mr Wells said.

Many, like Moree farmer Pete Finn, claim they have cracked the code and sell the secrets on the Internet.

His Pokie Player's Bible, made for friends and family, has sold 1000 copies in Brisbane alone. He is now in the middle of a bidding war between publishers, while selling his wares on YouTube.

Others, like ex-gaming industry employee Adam Morris of New Zealand give a "100 per cent guarantee" to hit the jackpot with his CD-ROM on beating the Pokies.

For the last 30 years, Ross Ferrar of the Australasian Gaming Machine Manufacturers' Association, has watched over the development of poker machines in Australia.

His advice to a would-be scammer: "Don't bother, you could be prosecuted and it won't work. The machine will work. Simple words: don't bother."

Nick Johnson calls himself an "honest conman". He spends his life exposing rorts and rip-offs. Who better to take us through the many poker machine scams used throughout the years?

A low-tech scam was one of his favourites.

"It uses a humble drinking straw," he said. "The con artist places it inside the machine, so that the 5 cent coins roll over the 5 cent slot and land in the $2 slot, meaning they get to play $2 machines for 5 cents."

"On the old-fashioned mechanical poker machines, the con artist would carve out a slug from a piece of metal to a piece of line, play the machine and pull the coin straight out again."

Another scammers' trick was called the "monkey paw".

"It's the first piece of apparatus to be used to try and trick the pokies," Mr Johnson said.

"The idea was, it would go up the old mechanical style pokie machines, trigger the coin counter so it couldn't tell how much to pay out. A $5 would quickly become a $100 payout."

Another device was called a "light sensor", a bright light attached to a small battery pack.

"Most of the new machines have a light sensor and a bright light shined at just the right intensity will blind certain poker machines, causing them to pay out thousands," Mr Johnson said.

"One man managed to take $200,000, just from this."

But the "best" poker machine scams have been pulled by people in the business: the people responsible for programming the machines can often have access in order to change the chip, to make sure that instead of being random, it pays up when a certain combination of buttons and combination of bets have been made.

But according to the experts, the only true way to come out ahead in the pokies is to play them less and for smaller amounts of money.

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