Take a trip to Las Vegas and you’ll likely end up in one of the glittering resort’s many casinos. These meccas of money are a heck of a lot of fun to spend an afternoon in; the chance of winning big is always around the corner, and the glitzy, flashy surroundings can really ratchet up one’s levels of excitement!
Casinos are incredibly expensive structures- many in Vegas cost over $1,000,000,000 to build- and naturally house an incredible amount of money. As such, the security systems and practices employed by casinos are vast, but with most of our ideas regarding casino security informed by Hollywood, how far are these perceptions from reality?
Many casino flicks and television shows feature a central ‘control room’ from which hotel security staff, studiously gazing at hundreds of individual closed-circuit-television screens, gaze at customers on the casino floor hoping to discover card counters, thieves and other nefarious characters trying to cheat the system. This aspect of casino security is indeed true; surveillance systems in casinos heavily utilise so-called ‘eye-in-the-sky’ camera systems attached to the ceilings of the casino. Every table, cashier’s desk and doorway is watched from the main surveillance room, security personnel able to control, via joysticks, the cameras, following suspicious individuals around the room!
Casino Security
Online casinos’ security measures are similar to those employed by regular, land-based casinos, but naturally most of the security measures centre around online payment methods and other pay-based issues. On online gaming sites such as JackpotCityCasino.com, customers’ payment details are checked against the records of banks, other gaming sites, card companies and fraud agencies in order to stop stolen cards being used for gaming. Personal data is also very secure, being put through a number of encryption mechanisms and are sent via safe, tested and secure payment methods and services. In many ways, online gaming is a heck of a lot more safe than bricks-and-mortar casino gaming.
In the movie 21, biometric software features as an impediment to the card-counting protagonists, a tricky, technological hurdle that the characters have to overcome. Facial recognition software, fingerprints, hand geometry, iris recognition and voice recognition are all used throughout various industries but unfortunately for film aficionados, their usage in casino environments is rather small. These technologies are very expensive, so only a few casinos will likely use them.
If a casino does use such technology, it’s not likely to let loose the fact; having a degree of mystery surrounding security systems will make it harder for really committed criminals to come up with successful plans to steal money, after all.