A married couple from Kazakhstan won more than $800,000 at different card games at a Crown Sydney casino using a tiny camera hidden in a Mickey Mouse T-shirt. This cheating method was recognized as the top scam of 2025.
The audience voted on the top scams of the year Thursday to close out the World Game Protection Conference in Las Vegas. The conference dubbed the scam the “Holey T-Shirt Cam Scam” and WGPC founder Willy Allison said it represents a trend that casinos should be on the lookout for.
The couple was arrested by New South Wales police in November after security at the Barangaroo casino saw a woman wearing a camera attached to her shirt. They were accused of streaming the action and using ear pieces to communicate with each other.
Allison said the couple came to Australia in October and started playing Texas Hold’em and Mississippi Stud.
“They were cheating using concealed cameras,” Allison said. “Initially, they were using a cell phone placed on the table in the first position right next to the shuffle. They were able to receive the image of the cards.”
When the couple started winning, the casino banned cellphones from the surface of the table. The couple went away, then returned and continued to win using the concealed camera.
“Surveillance noticed that the women wearing a Mickey Mouse T-shirt every day,” Allison said. “She was quite short, so at the table, Mickey Mouse’s head was an inch from the top. They zoomed in and saw what it was – a hole. It was a concealed camera.”
Allison said the case remains under investigation and someone else could be involved. The husband was in jail and the wife under house arrest and both their passports were taken away. Using electronic devices to assist in playing the game is against the law in Australia.
“The casino was lucky the couple came back,” Allison said. “They stopped playing and were going back to Kazakhstan with AU$1.2 million (US$840,000), but they came in for dinner and surveillance picked them up. Bad move on their part.”
The case is similar to one in 2024 in Paris, where a concealed camera was used to stream the game for analysis of the dealers’ cards on a poker-derivative game, Allison said. One cheater found in a vehicle in a casino parking lot observed the stream and communicated how to play the hand.
That case was the No. 1 Scam of the Year voted on at the 2025 conference in Las Vegas.
“This is a problem and a trend,” Allison said. “It highlights the danger of cell phones and concealed cameras on tables.”
Casino consultant Bill Zender, who outlined the top scams of the year with Allison, said several solutions include inserting a security card, which worked in the Australian scam case. In addition, casinos can program systems to drop a card automatically underneath the community cards.
“Relying on your people to always come out and level the table when they spread is something I wouldn’t want to (rely on),” Zender said. “Dealers get sloppy, and right now advantage players are moving from blackjack to alternative games like Mississippi Stud.”
No. 2 Scam of the Year
This was centered in the U.S. at the Mohegan Sun Casino & Resort in Connecticut and involved marked pai gow tiles, a scam went unreported since it occurred last year. The amount taken was undisclosed.
Shamar Miller, a Mohegan Sun security analyst, appeared at the conference to talk about the scam —marking the tiles with a piece of sandpaper glued to the man’s right thumb.
Miller said an organized group of 10 to 15 patrons marked more than 32 boxes of tiles, which they during the game. A man was arrested and he had more than 20 players cards from Boston and the rest of the East Coast.
The success at the table created suspicions and further examination discovered the marked tiles. This resulted in a change in procedure involving an extensive examination and cleansing, Miller said.
“We reworked the procedure of when the tiles come on and leave the table,” Miller said. “We use a UV light to check the tiles for scratches or abrasions. We wash the tiles. We stack them back up, stagger them, and use a camera to zoom in on the fronts and backs of the tiles.”
Allison credited Miller and the casino for discovering the scam and alerting the attendees.
No. 3 Scam of the Year
A baccarat collusion scam in Macau in July involved a dealer and two players working together on past posting, netted more than $250,000, Zender said. The trio were arrested.
“It went undetected for weeks and surveillance picked it up doing a routine scan of the casino,” Zender said.
Allison said the massive amount of side bets in baccarat make past posting “a little bit juicier,” because of the odds paid.
“It’s tempting, and it’s even more important now that we look at our layout design and make sure those juicy bets are not on the outside but on the inside,” Allison said.
Other top scams
Card marking remains a problem and was a top five scam voted on this year.
Zender said Mississippi Stud is a game vulnerable to marked cards. He cited a study that if all the cards in Mississippi Stud are marked, players have a 270% advantage over the ante. “Mississippi Stud – I love the game, but it’s open for attack,” Zender said.
There also continue to be issues with counterfeit chip usage in Asia, with a reported loss of $365,000 in South Korea in spring 2025. Allison said this issue pops up every year and was a top five scam this year.
In another scam just outside of the top five, two casino hosts were accused of stealing $27,000 at Live! Casino & Hotel Maryland in May. They had the authority to issue comps to guests that included dining vouchers and free slot play and were accused of creating fraudulent player rewards accounts and loading the comps onto the cards.
“It wasn’t caught sooner, because relaxed guard rails were put in for the hosts,” Zender said. “Surveillance got wind that an unbelievable amount of free play was issued by these two hosts.”
Allison said credit goes to surveillance; the scam could have gone on for a long time if they hadn’t been proactive.
“It’s very important that you do the oversight to catch the problems,” Zender said of what was learned at the conference this year. “Don’t just assume there’s no problem.”
Other casino concerns
Besides the top scams of the year, Allison also called out another growing area of concern for casinos.
“What seemed to be trending this year was strong-armed robberies,” Allison said.
“There was also a casino security guard in Montenegro who’d been watching the cage supervisor going into the vault using a password. He managed to get the password and in the early hours entered the cage, stole $300,000 in cash, and ran out. They picked him up a few days later in the mountains.”
Allison said a man stole several hundred thousands of dollars in chips from a private gaming room at Genting Highlands casino in Malaysia in August.
A man jumped over a cashier counter and stole more than $70,000 in Colorado. He had tried it, before but was unsuccessful. “He bounced up on the cage counter, took $76,000, and took off outside,” Allison said. “It’s that easy.”
Allison also highlighted the case at the former Rampart Casino in Summerlin west of the Las Vegas Strip in November, when a man wearing a security jacket, ballistic helmet, and face mask threatened staff with an AR-style rifle, stole an undisclosed amount of cash from the cashier’s cage, and escaped.
“I have concerns that we’re getting a little bit loose in the area that used to be a fortress – the bank,” Allison said. “There’s a lot of goofy stuff. That’s my rant for this year on why it’s so easy to steal cash from casinos.”
