The guys who stole money from the casinos
The casinos rob us, yet there is always an exception. These guys stole millions from the casinos and got away with it. This scam was truly one of the best ones in history primarily because they were actually never caught and their identity was never discovered. This rip-off was a really obscure; no one was paying close attention or trying to prevent it from happening. It was based on stealing the identity of people.
If you have ever dreamed of walking into a casino getting 200,000 dollars in chips then straight after cashing them out and you would never ever have to pay back the casino. This is what was possible once all the steps had been initiated. It was really genius level minds that allowed them to get away with this and never get caught. Let me explain exactly how it worked.
The Roselli brothers where gangsters from New Jersey. Each time they pulled this trick they elected to change their city while in tow, some of the cities they visited where Atlantic City, Las Vegas and even Puerto Rico. Each weekend they would go to a new city and a new casino, always with the same confidence and “professionalism“. It began in the early 1990’s and concluded in January 2000.
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| This was better than Ocean’s eleven! |
The method
The first step was to finding a computer hacker mastermind who was able to access the nation’s credit card information. Once they were able to obtain this information they carefully found the people with the absolute best credit card rating and ones that had multiple accounts linked to their names.
So once they had identified who they were going to use, they created accounts that were in these people names. Once they had done this they requested for credit in each of the casinos in the cities I mentioned before. Of course it was not that simple the casinos requested that they must have a stable cash balance in these accounts for at least 6 months before they would be allowed to access their credit.
This was absolutely no problem for the brothers as they had mountains of cash lying around them from their other criminal activities. So they then put the cash into each of the accounts, they always put $50,000 into each of the accounts. They would do this for many accounts, now all they had to do was patiently wait. Once six months had passed, pretty much every single bank would allow them another $50,000 in credit from all of the accounts they had created previously. Boom, they had pretty much doubled their money in 6 short months. They ran this operation every single weekend for 5 years changing city and casino every time. This allowed them to lay low and stay hidden from the authorities, pretty ingenious.
One question I am sure that you are asking yourself is how they could lift the $100,000 in chips they had now had ($50,000 first deposit and $50,000 credit) and then straight away cash it out. Would it not of been very suspicious to the casinos. Well let me explain exactly what they did when they collected the chips from the casino. So once they collected the chips they would go and start betting just like any regular gambler but they were betting using a technique known as an offset betting. Basically what that means is that they are betting to make the bosses who oversee the gambling believe that they are losing all of their chips when actually the other brother was winning it all. That was a really nice tactic for tricking the casinos into believing they weren’t actually losing anything themselves.
All of the action took place in baccarat and at craps card games. Because of this the casinos believed that the brothers where always losing money even though they weren’t. So the casinos happily gave them more credit to gamble with some cases even up to $1million in the biggest casinos. This is how they really earned the big bucks and really got their bonus pay check from the casino!
Now all they had to do was simply keep on repeating the process and gaining the rewards. A measure they added for safety was to hire their acquaintances to do the job instead of them so then the casinos would never catch onto it. The Rosellis where actually much more than 2 people to their eye even though the 2 brothers reaped most of the rewards.
Happy ending
The final weekend the brothers pulled the con was in early 2000 around new years’ time. They really set up an absurd amount of false identities and planned to play big with the money all these names had built up on their credit. They were taking a huge risk of getting caught doing this but I admire them somewhat for having the courage to actually pull it off and never ever get caught, truly amazing. Basically they did what they had been doing before but to a much more extreme scale. They were making single bets of $100,000 they really went to the next level than they had ever done before, and once the night was over they were gone with all the money never to be seen again, I get goose bumps just thinking about it.
Over the course of these years there total intake was a crazy $37 million. The real miraculous thing about it all was even after their big burn out in the New Year no one was any wiser and it wasn’t until 6 months after until the FBI even figured out that a scam had even taken place at all. They only managed to find out when all the people were getting letters sent to them about their credit that they hadn’t paid, they went answered and then eventually the FBI got involved. By the time they had figured it out they were long gone to a beach far away.
A final thing I would like to mention is that the name Rosellis didn’t actually come from the two scammers it came from the names of the 2 brothers whose ID they had stolen previously. They never did find the actual suspects so they kept that alias instead. The fact they are probably alive today is a bit creepy but more it is truly a testament to how perfect their scam preparation and information was.