Although it would be a rare day indeed that you ‘find’ a casino chip just lying around, there are plenty of people who are trying to cheat casinos by stealing chips from them and then returning at a later date to cash them in.
Three men in Singapore went the extra mile in the pursuit of their ill-gotten gains, using super glue on their hands to steal chips from the gaming table.
But one of the thieves was caught by another player, and now the trio face between seven and ten months in jail for their crime.
That sticky-fingered gang aren’t the only ones to have attempted to rob chips from a casino. A baccarat dealer in Sydney was caught on security camera stuffing £9,000 worth of chips into his sock back in 2020, while an employee at the same The Star casino ‘sold’ £5,000 worth of chips to a player for £1,000 in cash.
On another occasion, Robbi Jade Lew – who was accused of ‘cheating’ by Garrett Adelstein in a Hustler Casino Live poker game – later found out that £13,000 of her chips were stolen after she briefly left the table.
From the sophisticated to the downright brazen, plots to steal casino chips are not in short supply. But these days, even if a thief can get their hands on some chips it’s highly unlikely they will be able to cash them for one good reason….
Are Casino Chips Tracked?
In 2004, casinos enjoyed a major breakthrough in their battle with fraud when the first set of chips containing RFID tags were launched.
Radio frequency identification (RFID) allows for every single chip to be tagged with what is effectively a tracking device, allowing the casino to monitor the location of each of their chips over a distance as far as dozens of metres away.
Each RFID tag can be scanned in real-time too, so placing readers at entry and exit doors is an excellent way of catching thieves – and unscrupulous employees – trying to take chips off of the premises.
Chips that do make their way out of the casino can be monitored and thieves identified, while chips with RFID tags are much harder for your average fraudster to counterfeit.
In short, modern day casino chips are very hard to steal – and even harder to cash in. Casinos can turn off the RFID chips, which automatically renders them useless and without value.
That was a lesson learned the hard way by Anthony Carleo in 2011. He must have been feeling pretty pleased with himself when he stole £1 million worth of chips from the Bellagio in Vegas, but rather less chipper when the casino turned off the RFID tags and rendered them instantly value-free.
Carleo was later caught trying to sell the chips to an undercover police officer, and was sentenced to up to eleven years in jail.
Do Casino Chips Expire?
As the technology of casino chips improves, so too do the options available to casino bosses.
They can declare chips expired if they want to refresh their gaming floor or if they suspect that there’s issues with fraud, and as soon as the RFID tags are switched off the chips cannot be used in that casino or any of its sister branches.
However, in some cases a casino will honour any chips you may have by exchanging them for newer versions that retain the same value. So, if you do accidentally walk out of a casino with a chip in your pocket, you might be able to cash it in or at least swap it for a chip(s) of the equivalent value.
A casino will usually issue a warning of when it plans to upgrade their chips, giving you a date by which you must take back your expiring chips by. But remember, you must be able to prove that the chips are yours – not always the easiest of tasks. Therefore, it’s recommended that you cash your chips in at the casino at the end of your session, rather than be tempted to take them home as a keepsake.
Mind you, that’s not to say that some chips don’t hold their value or even increase in worth if they are considered to be a ‘collectible’. “Some people walk out of casinos with a pretty good amount of values in chips, and they sometimes end up with collectibles valued at more than what the chips were worth,” said Sheldon Smith, a casino chip aficionado.
Indeed, two rare chips sold for a combined fee of nearly £100,000 at a collectors’ club convention in 2014. Those were chips stored by their owners after visits to casinos that shut decades ago – the Golden Goose and the Lucky Casino in Las Vegas.
Because of the dangers posed by fraud, the disposal of expired chips is a very formal process – an authorised company will transport the chips to a plant where they are crushed into dust, all watched by an official gaming board auditor.
What Happens to My Chips If a Casino Closes Down?
Now if the casinos closes down, on the other hand, you’ll want to hope and pray that you can quickly cash in your chips.
In some cases, e.g. where the casino’s operator has gone bankrupt, you may not be able to redeem your chips for their monetary value. In this case, all you’ll be left with is a keepsake – and one that will be worthless if there was thousands of the same chip previously in circulation.
If the casino is simply shutting down that particular venue, you may still be able to cash in your chips for their value. The venue owner will issue a warning or two to say how many days you will have to redeem your chips before they expire.