Fake online stores reveal gamblers' shadow banking system
uk.reuters.com
uk.reuters.com
"Taniguchi swapped the tray of thousands of winning silver balls for a receipt, which in turn was swappable for alcohol, toys or other prizes. To get money, you need to ask for the “special prize” tokens. These are plastic gold-coloured tokens that can be swapped for cash -- but not within the pachinko parlour. Instead, they are cashed in at TUC shops that are always located nearby and exist as a legal loophole enabling you to win money in a country that technically forbids gambling."
1 - http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20120815-the-big-business-of...
It looks like these might be actual gold chips of 1g and 0.3g...
She received 8500 yen, about $70 at the time. One gram of gold was about $48 at the time so it seems to fit.
Obviating the need for the bullion to be more than just gold plated under most circumstances . . .
And making the seals and/or enclosures almost as valuable as their face value in actual gold, since they could be substituted for the real thing at any price level and follow the same pricing fluctuations.
I could never really place my finger on what it was I disliked about them except that the games bored me. But it was so much more than that. I failed to connect the dots until exactly the moment I read your comment.
There is a void, an abyss of loneliness and sorrow. Many of the people there are empty. Lost. An air of depression, desperation hangs in the air. It's like they've lost the will to live and this is their last hope at redemption that fades with every token they drop into the machines.
As an empath, this emptiness, this void that you describe being so palpable. That cuts to the very core of how it makes me feel when I enter them and why I spend the entire time longing for the door. It's like the Dementor's Kiss for me.
Thank you! Sincerely!
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning_chamber
Their need for instant gratification, the pleasure centre in their brains triggered just enough to keep them ignoring the stress of their losses. Distracting them long enough to make them think they can win it all back and get back on top.
It's like playing poker in an interrogation room with a good cop and a bad cop. The good cop comes in enough to make you think you're okay. It doesn't matter whether you're innocent and you only lose a day of work or you're guilty and lose your freedom, you still lose.
People go in thinking they can beat the system and the rare few do, but most don't. Overall, the house always wins. That's why the doors are still open and they earn yearly profits of millions of dollars while a whole bunch of their patrons gradually lose their homes and the shirts on their backs.
I think about gambling the same way I think about, say, playing a recreational sport. I'm going to lose money (participation fees) but I'm going to have fun.
I know people who'd happily drop £30 a month on junk food or some other frivolous and non-essential purchase, yet they call me an addict. Maybe I am maybe I'm not, I don't know. I do know that I have a good time for a couple of hours and if I'm lucky, I get to walk away with a couple hundred extra in my bank account.
It makes for a good counsellor, but I can't fix everyone's problems and I have to remind myself of that constantly.
Everyone is responsible for their own feelings. I am responsible for my own.
I have to remind myself of that numerous times every day or I spend all day feeling guilty for not fixing things for everyone.
Their journey is not mine. My journey is not theirs. I can share their path, they can share mine, but I am not here to fix everything for everyone. All I can do is be there and show them how they can fix it for themselves.
But now we're totally off-topic.
You might like reading this book, Addiction by Design:
http://www.powells.com/SearchResults?kw=title:addiction%20by...
It's about how much research and development has gone into making those machines as addictive as possible. Also one of the most depressing books I've ever read.
Actually, this sounds pretty fascinating. I will check it out.
Thanks
Recommended
This is a relatively low variance and no skill way to have fun at a casino. The craps table are usually where the fun people are.
A few general comments:
- Your expected value on a $10 bet is -$0.15. You get maybe 25-30 bets an hour at a full table. It's a very cheap game to play.
- Tables are active at different times in different casinos. Evenings are often the best time. Weekends can be good, but sometimes more crowded and/or higher minimums.
- Stakes can matter in some casinos. The difference of clientele at a $5 min table and a $10 min table can be noticeable. Casinos with a wider range of min bets will also have wider range of atmospheres. Pick your poison.
- Remember that you are responsible for your bet and collecting your winnings (i.e., pulling it in). Dealers sometimes make mistakes, and sometimes people grab the wrong bet (intentionally or unintentionally). This is usually not an issue, just stay on top of it at a busy table.
- Bring some $1 or $5 chips to tip the dealers and the cocktail waitresses. Good tipping usually gets you better service.
A friend of mine used to be a professional gambler. He stuck to the poker tables... I guess he must've played medium stakes. He did pretty well because you're playing against the other players, so even though the house wins overall, if you're a decent poker player, you can walk away with more than you started every night, and he did and the house still wins. The odds work far more favourably when you're betting against other players rather than the house. He started off without much money in the bank, but he was pretty quickly pulling in enough to cover his rent, bills and never seemed to want for much.
It always seemed to me if the game itself could've held my attention longer than 15 minutes, it would've been a pretty easy way to augment my income. The truth is though, after 15 minutes I'm bored with that.
My reply was mainly just to point out that some casinos do have fun areas that are accessible with a relatively small budget with small expected losses in the long term.
Not in general, but skill matters more in a game where the house skims off the top (so the players collectively are guaranteed to lose the amount the house has decided it requires independently of the gains or losses of individual players), and there is an element of skill influencing the gains and losses between the players.
This only makes the odds more favorable, though, for a player of above average skill for the players they play against; it makes them worse for players of below average skill, since, after the fixed house take, it still a zero-sum game.
In a sufficiently large population, over a finite period of time, there can be a small set of people that look like they are winners. This is called survivorship bias. Given enough time, these people will eventually lose.
However, anyone saying they know how to win on slot machines is probably just lying.
The house always wins in the end. The only way to win as a player is to cheat.
Some days he would work all day and see people put money in a machine and not win anything much (e.g. jackpot never came up). Believing that the machine had a payback rate that would balance out over a few hours/days, he would deliberately put a bit of money in at the end of the 'no winner days', and would often win enough that it made it worthwhile overall.
Anecdotal, but it seems consistent with your understanding and is a source of an edge.
Each spin has an equal chance of winning. The payback is adjustable in the software, but it does not pay extra when it's behind.
Of course, sometimes the jackpot is larger and that's a better time to play (but still not a good time).
However, I do not know what the situation is in the UK/EU at present, and I do not know what it was 20 years ago (when my brother was working there).
Doesn't mean the house would lose.
The advantage players would fight for the machine(s, if a pooled jackpot) and play until the jackpot was hit, at which point it would become -EV again and they would stop.
These machines are relatively uncommon, and getting more uncommon.
You can read about these players, I think they can squeak by making about minimum wage or thereabouts.
You are absolutely wrong, but your comment did manage to get mine to -1 point, so thanks for that. You are correct that slots are as random as the RNG within them (which, as it turns out, isn't actually that random [2]), however that does not mean they cannot be beaten. Slots can be beaten in a variety of ways:
1) Any progressive jackpot that gets high enough can skew the game's return to players to above 100%. Believe it or not, digital slot reels can be mapped out and the return extrapolated (example here [1]). On a progressive slot, with this data and the meter rise in hand (which can usually be easily calculated through mere observation), you can calculate the level at which the progressive makes the game positive.
2) Various slot promotions can be beaten. For example, there was a casino team that was tipped off to a promotion where a casino in the midwest was, for 12 hours, offering a double payout any W-2G win (any win over $1200 on a machine). So, they went and played a $100 slot machine, where almost any payout was over $1200 - essentially getting a double payout on every win. They had an enormous advantage with this promotion. These kinds of mathematically challenged promotions are not as rare as you would think.
3) Many slot machines have a "must hit by" feature, where the progressive must hit when it reaches a certain amount. Advantage players wait for these to get to within cents of the payout, locking up machines hours before and playing the minimum amount very slowly, so that they are in a position to win them.
4) Some casinos give loss rebates to some players that can turn almost any game positive, especially when combined with techniques that I won't mention here. This isn't necessarily limited to ultra high-rollers either - I am familiar with a few casinos where significant loss rebates start at losses of just $1,000.
There are more.
So you are absolutely wrong that there are not advantage slot players. There are teams of them that work in Vegas and other jurisdictions.
[1] https://wizardofodds.com/games/slots/hot-roll/
[2] https://www.wired.com/2017/02/russians-engineer-brilliant-sl...
This is a huge exaggeration from what my poker playing friends have told me. One notable individual being a professional poker player of several years and who has wins in national tournaments as well. So he really knows his game. We've often talked about the odds of winning and how sustainable it is as an income. The figure he gives me is around 20% - that is you can only expect to cash in around 20% of the competitions you enter. Which means you can often go months without seeing a return. However it's not just him I've seen give that figure, other players I've spoken to have echoed a similar statement.
That's the hard part of professional poker. It isn't the maths, it isn't the game theory, it isn't the table selection, it's the psychological resilience. You have to keep making very precise, very aggressive decisions even when everything is going to shit. You have to go all-in on the 51/49 coin flip, even when you've lost the last six coin flips.
It all evens out in the long run, but the long run can be distressingly long.
That's nowhere near the worst downswing that even most midstakes cash game players have had.
> the long run can be distressingly long.
Especially in live cash games. It can go six months. It can make actually-winning players believe they aren't, and drive them out of the game.
Poker swings were the most emotional time of my life--I played HUSNGs for a few years professionally and had very mild downswings, all things considered.
I once lost 14 games in a row against one of the top-10 worst players I'd ever played with. I'm quite certain my winrate was about 70% against this player (exceedingly high for HUSNGs, almost the theoretical edge)
Think of that more like the lottery for professional poker players. The celebrities do that a couple times a year, and the grinders hope to make enough for buy-in and "make it big". It's the least mathematically interesting way to "make a living" playing poker there is.
Where you grind out your living is the daily cash games. Yes, if you are making a living off of Poker it's basically a job. That means boring play for little hourly money most days of your life. After a few months, I imagine this feels more or less identical to an actual job.
I've watched "pros" grind out their day to day life, and it really doesn't seem that compelling. Better than working fast food, but on average seems to pay about the same and be roughly the same intellectual stimulation. 4 screens with 6 tables on each playing video poker every day doesn't sound that great to me.
There are quite a few people who play from places where living costs are low(er) like Costa Rica or Mexico or, for that matter, Hungary and make -- compared to the locals -- an astonishing amount of money. Istvan Ratkai, who wrote a few successful text adventure games in the eighties have been one of the most well known Hungarian video poker players. He said he played about 3-4 hours a day and made 50-70% more than the minimal wage -- the full time minimal wage, that is. He had an ordinary programmer job as well so this as a secondary was quite a nice haul.
The post you replied to was talking about cash games. Those are also fairly high variance--you certainly can't win every night.
Poker great Barry Greenstein says in his book that he won, IIRC, 70% of his sessions.
It's only a fraction of a penny in your favor for a $10 bet, but it will kill the mood at a table in no time.
That said, this superstition can be used to your advantage. One night there was a really negative and obnoxious drunk dude at the other end of the table. Every time he was the shooter, my buddy and I bet don't. He left the second time we did this. ;-)
In the movies they depict roulette table players as having a camaraderie, but I never saw that at roulette and I always see it at dice.
Anyway, I've bet don't for a few trips for most/all of the trip just to see what happened. These were on weekends when the tables were going to be full no matter what. I agree that it made for some fun banter, and we sometimes go back to it for fun, but we mostly bet pass now and get stupid silly with our cheering.
Another key to go along with this is don't go to the casino to win money. Go to the casino to spent $X over the course of Y hours to have fun. If you walk away with extra money, that's just a bonus.
couldn't agree with this more - gambling is about the ride and the "free" drinks you get while you're playing - never bring more money than you can afford to lose.
Craps is all about the whole table having fun playing against the house, and it's great fun when everyone is "winning".
If you walk into a casino with the goal of winning money (without a team and an exploit of some sort that actually gives you an edge over the house), you're doing it wrong.
Even if you do have an exploit and a team, don't count on keeping your winnings (see Phil Ivey and his baccarat scheme).
I'll see your low variance casino fun and raise you an old defcon story:
http://phrack.org/issues/54/1.html#article
Not for the faint of heart.
Addiction and using simple pleasures to fill the hole of depression is certainly a problem... however that issue transcends any individual pleasure. People can be addicted to TV, video games, political news, and even books.
Further, gambling is essentially a zero-sum game. The house always wins, equal to how much you lose, and pretty much every gambler loses besides the one or two rare examples who strike a jackpot the first time they ever play and then never gamble again. In contrast, buying a video game is a transactions both parties are normally expected to benefit from equally, and a video game's single player mode is expected to last at least 10 hours at a minimum nowadays not counting online play that lasts essentially as long as you want, while gambling machines need a constant input of money that adds up to much more over time. Even comparing to coin-based arcade machines, a session on one of those will last much longer for the price, and even in the microtransactions that have become common nowadays you at least end up with something more than the screen flashing some bright lights for a few seconds. So overall on this point, it seems to me like a gambling establishment is necessarily exploitative while a video game publisher isn't.
You or I might value a video game more, but some people who gamble actually derive utility from the games themselves (and from a purely scientific standpoint, even a near-miss in gambling results in the release of dopamine [1]).
[1]:http://www.nature.com/npp/journal/v36/n5/abs/npp2010230a.htm...
I like going to a casino once a month with friends, always with a preset $50 limit. That translates to hours of great fun, food, drinks. I'll start the day with poker if we're planning to stay for a while, I'm good enough to turn a profit (which I spend on other pure-luck games). Other times I'll just suss out the slot machines while watching a game at the bar.
On the other hand, I never play video games... I just find them universally boring. $20 for 10 hours of gameplay sounds like a waste of time and money to me. However, I do understand why other people enjoy video games.
At the end of the day, I've seen self-destructive gamblers pumping the slots and subtly self-destructive gamers pay2playing... as well as responsible gamblers and gamers. To each their own.
The main practical differences to me are that the gambling industry is more nakedly exploitative, more reliably engineered for addiction, and more frequently destructive to people's lives.
But I think parts of the video game industry are headed in that direction.
When I watch my brother and my nephew playing, say Battlefield 1, they are visibly having fun. They bought the game once and are getting many hours of enjoyment out of it, a few at a time. It seems a reasonably healthy pastime to me.
But then I'll watch people playing Zynga-ish games. They don't look like they're having fun. They look like people playing slots: low affect, compulsive, grinding away at something that never really satisfies.
So personally, it's not that I don't like gambling specifically. A friend's low-ante poker night can be a good time. It's that I hate profitable exploitation of people's weaknesses in a way that leaves them worse off. Industrial-scale gambling and shitty, addictive games are both in that bucket for me.
What separates responsible anything from anything else? Nothing at all.
Anything can be addictive if it lights up the pleasure centres in your brain and you use that to fill the hole of depression. Computer Games. Drinking. Gambling. Smoking. Drugs. Adrenaline. Shopping. Hoarding. None of these things will fill the hole in your heart or fix depression. They're just distractions. I used to be married to a drug addict. Her father was an alcoholic. I knew and spent time with dealers and other addicts. I have direct experience with that. I spent 6 years of my life dealing with that. So I have more of an understanding of what depression and addiction can do to your life than most.
Sure, I do have a lot of ignorance when it comes to casinos. But I have been in them, I have seen people gambling responsibly. I have gambled responsibly. You're right in your perception that I don't get enjoyment out of it. In fact, the act of gambling doesn't light up the pleasure centres in my brain. The wins and losses are academic. Clinical. But this goes far deeper than that. There are tons of things I don't get enjoyment that I have tried that don't give me this feeling about the participants.
I am an empath. The moods of people in my proximity greatly affects my own emotions. I frequently have problems untangling which feelings are mine and which are someone else's. I can be feeling light and happy and walk into a room where someone is in a bad mood, and like The Pink Panther, the cloud rolls in and my good mood is gone. I am under a cloud. It's usually not as clear cut as this, nor as easy to decipher that this isn't my mood. This is off-topic, I'm just trying to give you a sense of the fact that this isn't borne out of my own emotional preconceptions. This is borne out of the people around me, not the casino itself which I'm actually largely indifferent about. Just as I'm indifferent about people who smoke pot, enjoy computer games, find enjoyment shopping. This isn't about the activity. This is about the emotional well-being of the people in my proximity.
I agree, there are many people that do gamble responsibly for fun, they go out, they spend responsibly, they enjoy it for what it is, they walk away. I don't get this feeling from those people. These are healthy, emotionally balanced people. They're not trying to fill a void in their soul. They're just out having fun. Perhaps I'd enjoy their company. I can't say because I don't know them.
However, there are such a significant portion of people that aren't like this in casinos that it's impossible to ignore - to the point that I literally feel like it's suffocating me and invokes my fight or flight response. It makes me want to leave. If you suffer from claustrophobia, you will understand they symptoms profoundly. If you're put in a room you can't get out of, you suffer a physical and emotional response. You may be able to hide it from those around you. You may be able to look to everyone else like you're okay. But inside, you're suffering from an increased stress response, you feel uncomfortable, you feel hot, you might start to feel your muscles tingle or vibrate, you feel trapped, you feel like you need to escape, you're acutely aware of where the exits are and your shortest path to them. Add to that the fact that the hopeless lost void I'm feeling in those around me and that's how I feel in most of the casinos I've been in.
Consider the Rat Park experiment (http://www.stuartmcmillen.com/comic/rat-park/) — it seems "psychological addiction" in general is essentially a way of coping with a stressful environment.
This is quite sad really... I felt terrible for the rats in the cages.
Fortunately casino buffets are generally good enough that I can enjoy the food and put aside such thoughts.
I won't even buy raffle tickets for charity, I'd rather just give them money.
I consider it a financial decision. Akin to buying something I want.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srNvp7w341I
There's a place in the world For a gambler There's a burden that only He can bear There's a place in the world For a gambler, And he sees Oh, yes he sees And he sees Oh, yes he sees
There's a song in the heart Of a woman That only the truest of loves Can release. There's a song in the heart Of a woman. Set it free Oh, set it free Set it free Oh, set it free Set it free Oh, set it free.
There's a light in the depths Of your darkness There's a calm at the eye Of every storm. There's a light in the depths Of your darkness.
Let is shine Oh, let it shine Let is shine Oh, let it shine Let is shine Oh, let it shine. Let it Shine
Songwriters Fogelberg, Dan
Tbh, part of me wonders if it would be perfectly legal if they sold an actual product at a massive markup (say, "designer chocolate"), provided "bonus tokens", and allowed refunds of the chocolate even if it was purchased with those tokens.
I'm not aware of any laws that prevent the conversion of tokens to chocolate to refunds. Then again, a cryptocurrency is probably less hassle at this point than any of these fronts.
And I guess I'm not the only one to conclude that.
I don't know of their specific applicability (or not) w.r.t. money laundering.
[1] Item descriptions were colored, grey was "trash" and meant to be sold to vendor for cash, "green" were somewhat nicer/rare, then "blue" for very rare, and "purple" for epically rare, and "goldenrod" for legendary.
According to a Blizzard employee one of my coworkers talked to, their chargeback rates were significantly higher than even porn sites (15+%, IIRC), to the point that it was somewhat surprising that their payment processor was still doing business with them. It's unclear to me if those accounts were primarily used to generate mules to facilitate these transactions, gold farming, or something else.
Customer: "Hi, umm, it looks like I'm not getting my winnings from pokerfastlane dot com, can you help me with that?"
Support rep: "I'm sorry sir, we are a fabrics import/export company, we have no relation to pokerfastlane dot com."
C: "But they gave me this number..."
SR: "I'm sorry, I can help you only with fabrics related matters. Perhaps I could interest you in a nice afghan?"
They kind of have to, since the whole purpose of the support number seems to be to reassure people who know they paid “MyIllegalPokerSite.com” but see a charge on their bill from “MyTotallyLegitFabricStore.com” that the charge corresponds to their payment to the poker site, and that they shouldn't contest the charges as fraudulent with their card issuer.
My understanding is a Poker company (for example) puts all transactions from US customers through these fake stores. Then the organisation running the fake stores reimburses the Poker company outside of the US and takes a small slice for the service?
If they took deposits in their own name, the credit card companies and banks would refuse to do business with them.
Zip to around 18:15 in the video.
"After I set up the account, I couldn't quite figure out how to deposit money. That's when I got a phone call on my cell phone and a guy walked me through how to put money on the book. Took my credit card right over the phone. Then he assured me there wouldn't be anything on my credit card statement that said BetOnline."
What would show up on the statement was MoserSafety. Which was a front website. If you called the contact information, they confirmed they had no safety goggles, gloves, hard hats, etc. to actually sell you. It was a shell. In fact, they confirmed on the phone that the number called was a, "third party payment processing support service." Some time later, the site no longer existed.
http://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-britain-consett-companies-s...
Funny though, my friends who use Draft Kings were able to just VPN into NJ from NY to use it.
[0] https://www.dailydot.com/business/new-jersey-online-gambling...
I'm not sure if stuff like that is highly regulated but I was able to just buy it on eBay and it got to me no problem so it was pretty painless.
Based on purchases a friend of mine alleges one of his friends had made the really shady "somethings" go through .onion sites using bitcoin.