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It's still unclear how the organization broke the PRNG in the first place. Were they somehow able to get their hands on a machine for hardware analysis? Or did they just have their "operatives" play slots and capture video which they then manually analysed for patterns?

Offloading the computation to a remote server is a smart idea though. There is a lot of cool stuff happening in the game cheating space.

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Yes they did. Says so in the article.

Ah, must have missed it.

FTA it says that used machines proliferated at cheap prices after a 2009 country-wide ban on most forms of gambling.

I would assume that used machines are either destroyed by the manufacturer or resold only to licensed entities.

Machines were sold in Russia, and at the day the gambling codex contained only one chapter:

1. Gambling is banned

So, these casinos dumped machines as fast and as cheap as they can

when gambling just got banned nationally, you have very little incentive to maintain good relations with the manufacturer, and would rather just get whatever you can moneywise for such a large investment.

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