Berlin police find radioactive iodine on playing cards | Hacker News Reader

Berlin police find radioactive iodine on playing cards

bbc.co.uk

177 pointsdberhane78 comments

You can also get cheating devices [1] where the edges of all the cards are printed with IR barcodes, then a special camera (concealed in a modified phone or car key fob) can tell you upcoming cards by looking at the edge of the deck.

Of course, you need to convince people to play with your deck of cards first, so you can't just walk into a casino with these things.

[1] https://www.elie.net/blog/security/fuller-house-exposing-hig...

Wow what a crazy device! That link led me to Elie Bursztein's youtube channel where he posts all of his defcon talks (or at least a lot of them). They're all really good!

The corresponding HN thread on it from October of last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12769819

if the detector uses a laser scanner, the emissions should be easily detectable.

That is pretty cool. I wonder how this technology could be adopted by magicians? They could do some amazing card tricks with this I would imagine.

This is the plot device for an actual novel about a detective hired to solve a casino scam. Don't want to completely spoil it, but it's the main plotline.

Personally not interested in the novel, but the name of it would be appreciated by somebody who is

I wonder if the cards found were inspired by the novel

The author said most of the scams in his book come from real life, so it's possible someone did it in the past.

James Swain is the author, the series is his "Tony Valentine" books. Not fantastic writing, but packed full of scams and cons if you enjoy that kind of thing.

A more low-tech version of a casino scam was the subject of a 1966 Warren Beatty film called Kaleidoscope. Here the main character broke into a Swiss card manufacturer and marked the plates for the playing card decks used in all the casinos, with marks only visible via 'special' glasses. The technique being discovered, Beatty's character is coerced into participating in a Scotland Yard sting operation targeting an international smuggler with an addiction to gambling. Tedious movie.

Pretty interesting that the government is checking garbage trucks for radioactivity and also able to trace t back to a specific business.

In Germany, garbage is considered a serious issue. There are various levels and ways of mandatory recycling that need to be implemented by everyone, including private households. For example, depending on the city, paper, "Gelber Sack", organic material, and everything else besides special disposables like for example batteries must be seperated, and compliance may be checked, and fines may be handed out in case of violation. Some people moving to Germany are surprised about how serious it is.

This explains why the garbage was checked, and why it was possible to track down the source.

United Nations document on German waste management.

http://www.un.org/esa/dsd/dsd_aofw_ni/ni_pdfs/NationalReport...

It's actually refreshing to know this is happening somewhere, thanks for sharing.

This is pretty standard in Western Europe, it's about the same in Belgium, the Netherlands and France at least

The same here in Sweden too.

About half of the recyclable garbage is still burned along with the regular garbage, because it burns better.

Profit is, after all, more important than the environment. The garbage companies in Germany make somewhere between 50 and 100 billion per year.

The garbage companies are burning that stuff because nobody wants to buy it from them. Because often making something by way of recycling uses more resources than the alternative.

Radioactive material messes up certain types of fire detectors, and more advanced detectors detects also when they go outside their working parameters.

A plausible explanation would be that the garbage made some fire detectors in a power plant's loading bay to go offline.

Apparently garbage is really routinely checked for trace contamination of radioactivity.

Fortunately I125 is not likely to cause severe thyroid damage

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iodine-125

I got some injected several time when I was a kid (for angiography). As a kid, the fun part was peeing fluorescent liquid (little I knew...).

I used to have a friend with a masters in biochemistry. Once he tested a glowstick and determined that the components were completely nontoxic. (He couldn't vouch for all glowsticks, don't try this at home.)

He put each liquid component in a test tube and went out for beers. He poured one tube in a buddy's beer when he wasn't looking, and another in his next beer. Then he went in the restroom and unscrewed the lightbulb.

Exposing your friends to risk of rare or unknown side-effects for humor value alone. Awesome! /s

I'm more concerned that they were drinking such *&%$ beer that a glowstick didn't foul the taste.

I think that your friend was pulling your leg. The oxalate esters and hydrogen peroxide in a glow stick shouldn't be ingested, though the actual dye that gets excited to fluorescence would be relatively harmless. I also wouldn't expect the concentrations of active materials to remain high enough in urine for the glow reaction to be noticeable, even if all the chemicals were excreted unchanged.

Plus hydrogen peroxide is not that stable in acidic condition (i.e. your stomach) and your body is fully of peroxidases that catalytically breakdown peroxides quite quickly.

He was referring to the military version, would that be the same?

It would not be surprising if he was pulling my leg, we were a group of practical jokers. And this story made me swear off ever doing anything to him; in retrospect maybe that was the intent.

Yes, military glow sticks use the same basic chemistry: hydrogen peroxide, diphenyl oxalate or analogs, various excitable dyes that actually produce the different colors.

Yep, glow sticks are glow sticks. Ours come in fancy camo packaging though so you know they're suitable for lighting the portaloo.

Check out NileRed's video [0] for some great info. He is a young chemist who produces chemistry videos on youtube and goes into detail of things while still being understandable for someone who did well in high school chemistry

[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_CYwd6cHUA

Putting an unknown substance into another person's beverage at a bar is a good way to get yourself arrested.

I always thought a cool substance to invent would be something that makes methane visible i.e. non-colourless. Sneak it into people's food and see who is trying to break wind discreetly until a large green cloud appears behind them.

I'm having a hard time imagining how this hustle works. With the luminous ink or daub the idea is to see the markings from a distance. Here you would think you'd need to be fairly close with a geiger counter to detect the marking. So maybe it was a self-deal game or the dealer was colluding with the cheat? In that case maybe it's more like peeking with a shiner.

I wonder if you could build something to detect gamma rays which it sounds like the iodine emits, into a watch, possibly making use of a PIN photodiode.

Still... you really need a directional detector to make use of this.

Triangulate between two detectors?

"Eh, Slim Johnson, whys you always flapping yer arms around whens we playin poker?"

"Shoulder exercises, Bill. Shoulder exercises."

Lol oh god, Gary Larson would be proud. Still humor aside I think that you could deploy a partner to be the second point. Still, added complexity and new (albeit less awkward) questions.

The dealer just needs one that looks like a watch so he can tell when a particular card is coming up.

I was similarly curious; I think your guess about "peeking" is reasonable.

Assuming an unsophisticated house that doesn't switch decks, I was also thinking that you could even have a tiny bit of isotope-mixed-substance on one finger and "mark" cards that come into your hand on the back in some magnitude.

If the detector is near your wrist/in your sleeve you might be able to get some approximate magnitudes of various hands/face down cards in your proximity; or as you say, if the dealer was involved/the one doing the cheat it would be even easier since they could "listen" to the cards as they dealt them. You might not even need it to be directional in this case.

Maybe a device could detect the change in radiation when a card gets dealt (moved closer/farther from the player).

The restaurant in question is in the Marzhan district of Berlin[0].

[0] https://www.morgenpost.de/berlin/polizeibericht/article21267... (Article in German)

Does anyone know which (probably Vietnamese) game that was? Apparently it is played with round cut-outs of playing cards. Here is a photo: https://www.facebook.com/PolizeiBerlin/photos/a.253825908134...

Looks like what casinos do when they throw cards away so they can't be scavenged and used for play.

The police explicitly commented that you play with those circular cutouts and confirmed it again after confused questions by users but that could be wrong of course.

Ah. I didn't pick that up from the Google translated version I read.

i would guess it makes the deck unique so cards can't be added on the fly

The game is likely Xoc Dia, a common gambling game played with four tokens hidden under a bowl.

What's the legit use of infrared contact lenses? I gather Johnson and Johnson makes them.

Firefighting, search and rescue, power line maintenance, home inspection and of course, military/law enforcement night operations.

The older generation of vietnamese immigrants came due to the german democratic republic siding with communist vietnam because of the vietnam war. The traditional social order is patriarchal, so I would be surprised if the woman in question wasn't a strawpuppet to some extent.

In the linked articles is this awesome piece: "'Laser scam' gamblers to keep £1m" [0].

[0] http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4069629.stm

I mean, yeah, the only real rules of Roulette are "call it before the ball goes round three times".

Still, probably good they did it at the Ritz in London, rather than back home in Serbia, I have a feeling the outcome could've been very different.

This sort of thing is why I would never play cards for nontrivial money outside a regulated club. It's a lot less likely to happen when the owner stands to lose a license worth millions.

Pretty soon we'll have a mobile card printer generate new decks right on the spot.

And 30 seconds later, we will have remote hacks for the card printers.

And a year later, news that Uber knew about the hack but buried it.

Or e-paper cards that can change face via remote app.

A bit like the deck used on an early James Bond film if I recall correctly, allowing 007 to win at the table.

I guess this way the con men knew when the cards were hot!

good police work

Wait, so you can gamble at a restaurant?

Between closing and opening, yes.

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