Part III: Slot Machine Cheating · Pull Tabs
Pull-Tab Cheating
How it works
Pull tabs are sold one at a time. The cheat is the person selling them opening tabs without paying, keeping the winners, and redeeming those winners as ordinary prizes. The game’s paper looks right. The sale was never made. This is not a stolen TITO ticket. Pull tabs are a jar, a box, or a dispenser of preprinted chances.
Where it appears
Pull-tab games in a casino, a card room, or a licensed bar
On the record
In State v. Grow, the Washington Court of Appeals affirmed a cheating conviction against Richard Grow, who ran the pull tabs at the Wild Goose Casino in Ellensburg. The court described tabs taken without being paid for, and winning tickets redeemed from those deals. A theft conviction in the same case was reversed. The cheating conviction stood.
Detection & preventionADVISORY
The paid halfHow a monitoring room catches pull-tab cheating, and what stops it recurring, written for the desk, not the reader.
Detection and prevention is the paid layer. It opens on all 400 methods with the downloadable edition, or with any paid plan.
Every subscription tier carries full access to the Cheats & Scams Library, Professional upward: the detection and prevention notes on all 400 methods, plus the searchable edition as a download.
Already subscribed? Sign in and this opens.
Published as a detection reference for surveillance, compliance and gaming-operations professionals. Thresholds and tuning are set by the property. Nothing here is instruction: the method is described so it can be recognised.