Richard Marcus, says he ripped off US$20 million from the world’s gaming tables over more than two decades. 

“I was the most wanted casino cheater ever in the history of the world. They just could never catch me,” Marcus boasted with pride at his 25-year track record during an interview published in Asia.

Marcus, 50, is now a consultant to the casinos he used to cheat. He was never caught despite the array of surveillance gear installed by gaming operators in Las Vegas, Monte Carlo, Macau and Australia, he said in a recent published interview. 

He says he remained at large partly because casinos are too reliant on technology to catch the conmen. Asia’s gaming industry is undergoing an unprecedented expansion and will face the same problem, said Marcus, an American now living in Paris. 

“There is never a foolproof system because it depends on people. Never 100 percent,” he said on the sidelines of a regional gaming conference in Singapore. 

“No matter how many millions of dollars they invest in surveillance systems, if you don’t have the people, if the people are not smart, they are going to get beat anyway and that’s the problem.” 

As billions of dollars pour into Asia’s gleaming casinos, they are becoming the front line of a sometimes hugely lucrative battle between cheats and the house, say experts like Marcus.

Both sides look to employ the latest, most advanced technology, but security consultant Sal Piacente says a scam in the Philippines last year took the gaming security world by surprise.

An Asian syndicate used an improvised camera hidden up a member’s sleeve to film the sequence of cards in a deck as it was cut on a baccarat table in Paranaque City last May.

The order of the cards was relayed digitally to another gang member who, after analysing the footage in slow-motion, returned to the table as the deck finally came into play hours later.

Piacente, a 47-year-old from Brooklyn, said the multi-million-dollar “cutter scam” showed that as long as Asian casinos were the most lucrative in the world, they would attract the most skilful cheats.

“The scams that happen here (in Asia) are a lot more sophisticated than in the States,” he said at the Global Gaming Expo Asia in Macau, a southern Chinese city that generates five times the annual gambling revenue of Las Vegas.

“What was happening here in Macau five years ago, is happening in the States now,” he said in a interview published in Hong Kong.

Asia is in the midst of a casino building boom, fuelled by wealthy VIP gamblers from mainland China, with billions of dollars being invested in huge integrated casino resorts from Macau to Manila Bay and Singapore.

The new properties bristle with cutting-edge surveillance technology, but the cheats are coming up with their own high-tech innovations, such as the sleeve-camera used in the Philippines.

“If you go to a place like this in Macau, where the surveillance is a lot better trained, then the cheats have to be more sophisticated,” Piacente said on the expo floor at the glittering Venetian Macau resort.

Most of the exhibitors at Asia’s largest casino expo, , showed off the latest slot machines or video gambling innovations, but Piacente’s booth consisted of himself, a baccarat table and a bag of tricks.

Loaded dice, split chips and reflective gold rings are some of the more traditional tools of the cheater’s trade, which Piacente, president of UniverSal Game Protection, demonstrates with a magician’s flare.

He is also a master of sleight of hand - false shuffles, second deals, card palming - and can memorise a deck of cards instantly from sight.

He has worked a lifetime to perfect his skills, but tells his clients in the gaming world that the real cheats will be smarter, faster and better - especially in Asia where so much more money is at stake.

“I sit at home and practise thousands of moves for hundreds of hours. They’re at home practising one move for thousands of hours. They do that one move better than I could possibly imagine,” he said.

“An amateur practises until he gets it right; a professional practises until he can’t get it wrong.”

Hoffman Ma, deputy chairman of Success Universe Group, which owns the Ponte 16 casino in Macau, said US anti-fraud system manufacturers were tailoring their latest products for Asian casinos.

“We do probably have one of the most advanced systems,” he said. “Technology helps you to be more efficient... and with the huge traffic (of casino gamblers in Macau) you really need that assistance,” he said.

Nevada casinos, in contrast, were hit hard by the 2008 financial crisis and are struggling to keep up with surveillance technology, experts said.

“I hate to say it’s archaic,” said Douglas Florence, business development director at Canadian security camera company Avigilon, adding that many Las Vegas casinos still relied on grainy video stored on VHS tapes.

“Asia has been digital almost since day one because everything is new.”

Avigilon has partnered with South African company Cheeteye, which offers casinos software that scours data from multiple sources to identify suspicious behaviour patterns, such as increases in a certain player’s average wager.

Cheeteye representative Graeme Powell said the company’s revenues had doubled in the past two years as casino managers, particularly “young, tech-savvy” ones, adopted the system.

As for the Paranaque City cutter scam, several suspects have been arrested while the alleged ringleader, Singaporean lawyer Loo Choon Beng, was reportedly found dead in a Chinese hotel room in August last year.

Even Asian casinos run by Las Vegas Sands and other heavyweights of the industry are ill-equipped to handle professional cheats because their local staff lack experience, Marcus said. 

Sands spearheaded the expansion of gaming in the southern Chinese enclave of Macau, a former Portuguese colony, when Sands Macau opened in 2004. Las Vegas Sands is also developing one of Singapore’s two multi-billion-dollar gaming complexes. Malaysia’s Genting International has broken ground on the city-state’s other gaming and entertainment development. 

Early in April, Macau said it had overtaken the Las Vegas Strip as the world’s biggest casino draw, saying it raked in more than seven billion US dollars in 2006, five years after the sector was liberalised there. “All the cheating teams, especially the ones that are good, they are going to converge in Macau more and more because you have big, brand new casinos with inexperienced people,” Marcus predicted a few years ago.

“So they are going to get killed,” he said. 

“Big problem because it’s a brand new area and it’s going to be loads of inexperienced people, especially the dealers,” he explained. “They are going to get destroyed.” He said casino operators can limit the financial damage from professional cheats by following his advice and placing more emphasis on training staff to detect deft moves at the gaming tables. 

“I teach them certain moves to look for,” Marcus said. He also trains casino surveillance teams. But security is not just their responsibility — no one from the dealers to the one monitoring the video cameras can afford to relax, he said. “The problem with casinos is the people on the floor. They feel so secure because of the cameras that they don’t really do their jobs,” said Marcus. 

“The casinos are big now and in order for them to really protect their games; everybody has to be on guard.” Marcus said he quit cheating in 2000 because he had made enough money, and it is “almost like a natural crossover” to go from casino swindler to consultant. 

“I do it mainly because I need to be doing something to keep my mind going,” he said. He has written five books about gambling cheats, including “American Roulette,” a memoir of his own experiences as a jet-setting casino swindler. 

“People love scam stories where the small guys make all the money and nobody really gets hurt,” he said. “I never hurt anybody.