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Make Light Wand Slot Machines

Sweepstakes slot machines are the most productive games in any casino or online gaming platform. The player wins, the business owner wins, and sadly, the cheaters win too. Even if behind sweepstakes slots is a very well built software and not a traditional roulette dealer, cheaters still make their way in.

Today with electronically controlled machines there are a number of unique methods for trying to make a slot machine payout. Some of these devices/emp jammer delivered an electric shock to the slot machine, others are more elegant electronic devices that override the programming or disrupt the electronic circuitry of the slot machine. Back in the day, when slot machines started using the optical sensor technology, Tommy Glenn Carmichael invented a light wand that could blind these small, magical sensors. It was something like battery-powered mini light attached to a wire. 08 – Fake Coins.

What made sweepstakes slots so famous is the adrenaline rush they provide. By betting a small bet, sometimes a few quarters, you can win the jackpot or lose it all in the blink of an eye. This uncertainty is what gets the people going. Sweepstakes slots are easy games to play and work on simple rules. They have attractive backstories and characters, high definition graphics and outstanding sound effects. But the essential feature of these games is the prize. This prize usually means enormous amounts of money. With this said, it is not hard to see why gamblers always return to play and why some of them try to cheat. Further on, we will look at eleven most popular sneaky ways to cheat at sweepstakes slots.

#1 Using Cheat Codes

As we all know, sweepstakes slots and any other casino or gambling game, are heavily-regulated by the law. Authorities are always there to ensure that the casino and online gambling industry is running smoothly and correctly.

Gaming software developers are always coming up with new features and updates to upstage cheaters. Each sweepstakes slots machine is monitored and audited, meaning that the engineers behind the games know every code that runs it. Sometimes, they can use it for their benefit.

Let’s take Ronald Dale Harris for example. This notorious cheater was actually on board in the Nevada Gaming Commission. The Cheat Code method was his ” weapon” of choice. For many years, he cheated sweepstakes slots by knowing their codes. Usually, cheaters work in pairs or groups, and Harris wasn’t an exception. In 1998, his partner cheated a keno game and won over 100,000 dollars. Investigators discovered their scam shortly after.

#2 Blast From the Past: The Shaved Coin

Before explaining the scamming method, let’s find out what is a shaved coin. People use this practice since Roman times, and it seems it won’t retire any time soon. Shaving or clipping bits of metal from the edge of a coin would modify the currency but not alter it. Today, with technology moving at a fast pace, sweepstakes slots upgraded their system too. The games use a light sensor that registers the payment. In general, this optical sensor doesn’t transmit data to the physical comparison system. So, if you insert a shaved coin in the machine together with an object that matches the shape and size of the coin, the game will start. The trick here is that the game returns the shaved coin to the player and the one that runs the game is the actual object.

#3 Counterfeit Coins

Counterfeit or fake coins are as actual as they were in the past. Even though they require a lot of time and attention, cheaters still like to use this method.

Professional deceiver, Louis ” The Coin” Colavechhio got his nickname because of this scam. Using coin duplication, he cheated plenty of casinos of thousands of dollars. Police caught him in 1998 and served jail time until 2006. Shortly after his liberation, he went back to his old ways. He now serves time for counterfeit 100 dollar bills.

#4 The Light Wand Technique

This technique is one of the most famous cheats in gambling history. It takes a lot of creativity and knowledge for this scam, but Tommy Glenn Carmichael was no stranger to sweepstakes slots cheats.

When you hear the word ” light wand” you might think of Harry Potter or Dynamo. But this infamous cheater is far from being a magician. Charmichael manufactured the wand from a camera battery and a small bright LED. The light wand’s system was simple: by shining it into a slot machine, the sensor would go blind. After this, the game would pay out because the computer behind it wouldn’t know how many coins the player inserted or how much to give. Using this method, Carmichael was cashing in around $10,000 per day. He got caught in front of a sweepstakes slots machine in Las Vegas trying to cheat. Later on, after being incarcerated, he received a lifetime ban from entering a casino.

#5 The Piano Wire Method

As it shows by now, most of these scams came to life in the Casino Golden Era, the ’80s. The first record of this cheat surfaced in 1982 in Atlantic City. This scam involves a group of people and a 20 inch long piano wire. The wire is attached to the front of the game. This action allows the cheaters to stop the reel controller and move the reels as they like. When the reels line up, the machine pays out the jackpot.

By using this technique, a group of men collected jackpots worth 3.25 million dollars. This scam remained the most massive sweepstakes slot cheating scam in casino history. Security cameras filmed them while rigging a slot machine and winning the $50,000 jackpot in a casino in Atlantic City.

Make Light Wand Slot Machines Machine

#6 The Front-Back Joint

This scam hit the headlines in the ’70s and ’80s. It is one of the most clever cheating methods ever used. Cheaters use a homemade tool split into two parts. The top part is a metal rod bent in the shape of the letter Q. The second part is a long wire. By putting the bottom piece through the coin chute and the other part through the coin slot, the machine forcibly releases all the coins it stored.

#7 Carmichael’s Monkey Paw

Tommy Carmichael hits again, folks! This professional cheater invented the monkey paw scam. He came up with this method after researching some video poker machines. Let’s go back a little bit and remind ourselves that this happened in the 1980s. Video poker machines were new at that time, and the software running them was harder to jam. But Carmichael had a plan: he connected a guitar line to a bent metal shaft. By pushing this device into the machine’s air drain and moving it around, he would switch on the coin dispenser. Therefore, hello, jackpot! The coins would flood out of the sweepstakes slot.

#8 Ticket Validator Device

This technique is effortless to apply, and it is not as risky for fraudsters like other scams are. This cheating method comes in after paying out or gambling at a sweepstakes slot machine.

In some casinos, filling up sweepstakes slots with coins takes up a lot of time and effort. As a solution, they implemented tickets as a form of winning, that the player can cash in whenever he wants.

This scam also called “ticket in- ticket out”, goes like this: the slot cheat inserts a $100 bill from his banknotes, into the note acceptor. By pushing the cash out button, they receive a ticket. Later on, this ticket gets photocopied in such a way that it looks like a real voucher. The last step is passing trough casino ticket check-up. If the staff is not using a mobile device for checking the tickets, cheaters can end up cashing in the fraud voucher as well.

Nowadays, it is tough to get away with this scam because of the technology used. Every casino has pro devices and advanced security cameras systems, making it hard for fraudsters to fool them.

#9 The Chip Replacement Method

This method is the artwork of another sweepstake slots scam master. His name is Dennis Nikrasch, and his slots cheating concept remains a highlight in casino frauds history.

Everything started in his garage when he bought a slot machine. He opened it up to figure out how does it work and what are its main flaws. Nikrasch found out that the computer chips inside the game are reprogrammable. This scammer did it in such a way that the slot machine would pay out the jackpot in an instant.

After solving out that matter, he ordered a bunch of chips and hacked those as well. What he later made sounds like it’s out of a movie script. He hired a group of scammers that helped him fraud casinos for years in a row. They were entering casinos to play sweepstakes slots, but when no one was paying attention, they changed the regular slots with the fake ones. Using this strategy, Dennis Nikrasch made more than 15 million dollars in the ’80s. He got his conviction in 1998.

#10 The Software Glitch

Software glitches serve as a tool for slots fraudsters. By playing in a certain way or using a distinctive pattern, cheats could trigger a slots bug that pays out the jackpot. The bad part is that a lot of honest players that conquered the big prize legitimately cannot get a hold of it because of this situation.

This scam threatens the online sweepstakes slots as well. For example, a teenage boy from Finland scammed an online casino out of more than 130,000 euros. He took advantage of a software glitch and the casino’s policy to register under a fake name and transfer amounts of money to an online bank account.

#11 The Classic Yo-Yo Scam

This scam is an actual classic. You might have seen this on cartoons before. Mickey Mouse may have used it to steal a cupcake from a bakery. Well, the technique we saw on T.V. is the same one that sweepstake slot cheats use.

You attach a coin to a string, and then you insert it in the slots machine. The coin will immediately start the game, and you are supposed to retract the string. Therefore, you can play sweepstakes slot games for free. Nowadays, this scam is rather useless because of the advanced technology and software.

Tips for Sweepstakes Slots

Because we presented some of the sneakiest cheats for sweepstake slots, we will also show some useful tips for winning at them. Just because sweepstakes slot machines are present in every casino for as long as we ‘ve known, it doesn’t mean that they are less sophisticated. Behind every sweepstakes slot, there is a gaming strategy. Check out below some tips and tricks that will help you win at every slot machine:

One play: it’s a simple strategy that turned out the most effective as well. This idea states that you should play a slot machine once with the highest amount you can get. If you win, play again if not, try another device. You should have a bit of luck in store for this, but it will sure keep you from getting bored.

Small Jackpots

If you want to win at sweepstakes slots in a short time, reach out for the ones with the smaller jackpots. The lower the pot, the bigger your chances to win. If you play sweepstake slot games that pay out a big prize, the harder the strategy behind it, therefore, if you try to succeed in the short-term, most likely you will fail.

It takes up to several hours to gain huge jackpots. Giving out the fact that slots are called games of chance, it means that playing such huge bets will lower your winning chances. Your best option is to stay away from novelty themed sets with a big payout and stick to the ones that offer a smaller prize.

Video Reels

Best way to deal with this kind of machines is to avoid them. These sweepstakes slots are attractive, because of their outstanding graphics and cool sound effects. But as it turns out, these machines pay back far less than the normal ones. Video slots can offer 5% less money than a regular device would give out. Sure, 5% means nothing, but in the sweepstakes slots world, it makes a huge difference.

Is there a reason behind the difference? Yes, there is. Slots that display videos and other entertainment features take a bit longer to load. The casino considers this a stand by; in other words, they are not making money. Because of this reason, they chose to raise their charges for customers opting for these games. So, sticking to a classic slot machine is an excellent way to go, with higher winning stakes.

Stick to Fixed Payouts

Some video slots have fixed payouts, and others have progressive jackpots. This means they use a tool that increases jackpots with every losing play. In a more straightforward approach; the more people play, the higher the prize gets. Even if progressive slot games seem more attractive because of the big prizes, your odds are much lower than they would be at a regular machine. So, sticking to fixed maximum payout machines is a better choice if you want to take some money home.

In conclusion, there are many scamming methods and cheating tools out there. The casinos and sweepstakes slots industry are improving their security and software every day to avoid losing money due to cheating. Engineers and software developers are upgrading the games and platforms constantly. But the hacker became more and more experienced, and they get quickly accustomed to new codes and algorithms. What’s interesting about these sneaky cheats is that the ones that work are using easy tools. Most of these methods emerged in the 80s when names like Carmichael and Marcus were hitting the headlines on a day to day basis. It turns out; they earned their notoriety for a good reason. Luckily, with technology moving so fast, sweepstakes slots will eventually become cheat-free.

About Vegas X

Vegas X is a sweepstake slot and casino games developer and marketer. Specialized in the state-of-the-art 3D casino and multiplayer casino games, we guarantee a secure experience and a hi-tech gaming platform. Asides, we offer a wide range of solutions for internet cafes and casino businesses. As an entrepreneur looking to start a casino business, Vegas X has all the answers you need. We offer personalized solutions and customized gaming software, adapting to our client’s requirements.Additionally, we will be involved 100% in the process, making sure that the games, sweepstake slots and platform reach expectations and needs. Sweepstakes slots engineers are working closely with us, testing and implementing our products to ensure top quality and performances. Vegas X is a fully licensed company that leads to edge infrastructure. We assist our partners 24/7 so if you have questions or you need our help, contact us or visit the Vegas X website.

Michael LaPointe’s monthly column, Dice Roll, focuses on the art of the gamble, one famous gambler at a time.

Tommy saw the solution in a dream. “I’m seeing myself from behind,” he recalled, “and I have [the tool] in my hand.” All through 1990, he’d been searching for a way to cheat the latest slot machines. He needed a new tool, something to replace the clumsy old instrument that had landed him in the penitentiary. Night and day in his Vegas apartment, he toiled on a Fortune One video poker machine. But no matter what he tried, some riddle in the guts of the unit would thwart him.

Then, in the recess of sleep, the solution appeared in all its brilliant simplicity: a flexible piece of metal, wedged at the top, and some piano wire. “I woke up,” he told the History Channel, “actually got out of bed, and went and built it.” Tommy had found his answer: The Monkey Paw.

*

When a friend dropped by Ace TV Sales and Service in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1980, Tommy Glenn Carmichael was just an unremarkable repairman who moonlighted as a pool hustler. He had minor drug convictions and some juvenile mischief on his criminal record, but nothing about the thirty-year-old suggested that he’d one day stand among the most inventive cheats in gambling history.

Carmichael’s friend had brought along some toys to tinker with: a Bally’s slot machine and a cheating device called the top-bottom joint. Of how his multi-million-dollar criminal enterprise got started that day, Carmichael simply said, “We got to playing around.”

Triggering a payout with a top-bottom joint was a crude operation. A piece of guitar string comprised the “bottom” part of the tool. It went into the left corner of the machine, up against the circuitboard, and sent low-wattage electricity coursing through the unit. The “top” part was a piece of metal curved like the number nine. When inserted into the coin slot, it completed a circuit powerful enough to hot-wire the hopper, where the coins are kept.

Jackpot.

Sensing his destiny, Carmichael closed his repair shop and moved to Las Vegas, eager to put the top-bottom joint to work. After his first attempt, he walked off with about thirty-five bucks in nickels—chump change compared to what would come, but enough to confirm that he was onto something big. “You are thinking you are going to have yachts and cars,” he later told the Associated Press. “You know, the American Dream.”

That dream fell apart on Independence Day, 1985. After a few years of success with the top-bottom joint, Carmichael was playing slots at a Denny’s near the Strip when police slammed him against the wall and discovered the device. He was arrested, convicted, and sent to the penitentiary.

Make Light Wand Slot Machines Free Play

But he wasn’t scared straight. He knew he’d found his calling. Once he was out, Tommy vowed to reinvent himself as the slot machine wizard of Las Vegas.

*

When Carmichael was arrested in 1985, slots had come a long way from their nickel-plated, side-handled origins. German mechanics in San Francisco invented the first slots in the early 1870s, but it wasn’t until the turn of the century that the Liberty Bell machine set the standard, with its three reels of spinning lucky charms: bells, horseshoes, hearts.

Although slots gained popularity during Prohibition, their conquest of casino floors was slow. Compared to the skilled, high-stakes action of table games like poker and blackjack, slots were nothing but a pull of the lever of chance and the payoffs were relatively small. The machines were relegated to the periphery of the casino floor, and pejoratively associated with bored wives killing time while their husbands bet the farm. One Atlantic City casino vice president said the machines suffered from “the Rodney Dangerfield syndrome”: they couldn’t get no respect.

That began to change in 1963, when Bally Manufacturing introduced the Money Honey, widely considered the first modern slot machine. The Money Honey came with front-light electricity and sound effects, giving the play some sizzle. But more crucially, it contained a 2,500-coin hopper. Prior to the Money Honey, if the gambler hit a jackpot, they had to wait for a member of casino staff to verify the win and pay them in cash. As casino operator Warren Butcher said, “This didn’t just slow up play, it kind of suggested closure, an end to the game … it tempted the customer to cease play and walk out the door with his winnings.”

With a 2,500-coin hopper, however, odds increased that the gambler would keep playing their winnings back into the machine. Play became continuous, endless. The Money Honey set the industry on an illustrious track that would, some forty years later, lead one Canadian company to market adult diapers specifically to slot-machine addicts who refused to staunch the flow of play. In 1981, slots out-earned table games at Las Vegas casinos, and the same happened in Atlantic City in 1984.

Each phase of the slot machine’s evolution inspired commensurate innovation among cheaters. It began with plugged nickels and coins on strings. At one point, you could pour laundry detergent into the slot in lieu of money (how someone discovered this is anybody’s guess), or jam the gears by giving the arms an awkward tug at just the right moment. Then came a succession of more sophisticated tools like the shim, which could manipulate Mills and Buckley machines, and Jenny’s Shaker, which enabled you to move the reels around.

It was a constant arms race with manufacturers. As soon as a cheating device gained popularity, security was one step ahead. The top-bottom joint, which first inspired Tommy Carmichael, worked for a while, but it was old-fashioned by the time of his bust in Denny’s. “I was playing a dinosaur,” he said. In 1990, after his time in the penitentiary, slot cheats awaited the next breakthrough.

*

Tommy’s Monkey Paw, nicknamed after its wedged, beckoning tip, slid up into the payout chute and triggered a microswitch, emptying out the hopper. The success was overwhelming. This wasn’t the cursed monkey’s paw of W.W. Jacobs’s short story; Carmichael had gotten what he’d wished for, and it was excellent. “You could leave a whole room empty,” he marveled, estimating that he regularly walked away with $1,000 an hour. “You got a credit card that won’t run out.”

But in the slot cheat business, triumph is always short-lived. Less than two years after The Monkey Paw’s invention, fresh innovations in security rendered it obsolete. Indeed, the legacy of The Monkey Paw wasn’t so much in its lasting efficacy, but in the confidence it instilled in Tommy. Archimedes once said, “Give me a lever and a place to stand and I will move the earth.” At the end of the nineties, Tommy Carmichael declared, “Give me a slot machine and I’ll beat it.”

In 1992, Tommy was perusing the showroom of International Game Technology (IGT), a leading slots manufacturer, disguised as a customer. He needed to understand what was going wrong with The Monkey Paw. When he asked an engineer for a glimpse inside one of the machines, to his amazement, the man obeyed. Eureka. “The second he opened it up,” Tommy said, “I knew how to beat it.”

The new machines employed electronic sensors to keep track of how many coins were being dispensed by the hopper. Tommy’s new device, “the light wand,” comprised a camera battery and a miniature light bulb. When shone up into the machine, the light wand blinded the sensor, making it oblivious to how many coins it was dispensing. Say you put a hundred bucks into the machine, then requested it to cash out your input. With a light wand, that hundred would quickly become two, then three—whatever you had the nerve to take.

It was Tommy’s most devastating invention yet. The light wand cost just $2.50 to build, and some slot cheats said they could make $10,000 a day from it. The device proliferated so widely that gambling authority Jason England dubbed the mid-’90s the “light wand era.” “It was probably the device that took more money out of the industry than any other,” England said, estimating the damage in the high hundreds of millions.

Tommy had finally chased down his American Dream. He owned a house in Rancho Bel Air and a Jaguar XJ6; he dated a topless dancer; he paid his taxes on time. Touring around in a mobile home, he’d cheat casinos in Connecticut, Colorado, and Louisiana. In 1995, risking a walk on the plank, Tommy took seven cruises in six months, ripping off slots all through the tropics.

By now, his operation was perfected. He always worked with a team of “shades,” using them to block security, and kept a dutiful eye on the latest technological developments. When IGT installed the Actuator Arm to counter the light wand, Tommy answered the challenge in just over an hour with “the hanger.” He was at the height of his powers, an artist in his prime: “I really felt they couldn’t make one I couldn’t beat.”

*

Although lacking the romance of card sharps, or the freakish genius of card counters, slot cheats are uniquely innocuous, almost laudable characters. If you cheat at table games, you’re siphoning money from your fellow gamblers. But if you cheat at slots, it’s just you versus the casino. There’s a reason that slots are nicknamed “one-armed bandits”: we intuitively sense that their gains are ill-gotten. And so, like Omar Little in The Wire, the slot cheat is only stealing money that‘s already dirty. “I wasn’t hijacking somebody at the family store,” Tommy said. “It was always directed at the casinos.” One notorious cheater named Timothy John Childs once listed “slot cheat” as his occupation on a loan application; that’s how close to legitimacy it sometimes seemed.

But the life of a slot machine outlaw came with high risks. Tommy’s enterprise began to unravel in 1996, when he got busted with a second-generation light wand at Circus Circus. Those charges were dropped, but Tommy kept surfacing on law-enforcement’s radar. In 1998, he was arrested again in Laughlin, Nevada. At the time, he was dreaming up his most ambitious device ever. As he described to the television show Breaking Vegas, written by Peter Fruchtman and directed by Ted Schillinger, “The Tongue” would enable him to steal about two thousand dollars per second by loading up machines with credits and then cashing out. The plan was to snatch millions and retire.

When he was apprehended again, in Atlantic City in 1999, it turned out that federal wiretaps had been recording Tommy and his crew discuss The Tongue. In 2001, he admitted to operating an illegal gambling enterprise, and was given eleven months in prison. It was estimated that his team had stolen over $5 million. Even with all that, Tommy probably would’ve found his way back into the life, hypnotically drawn, like so many gamblers, to the dazzling interface of the machine. But then came the Black Book.

Make Light Wand Slot Machines

Created in 1960, the Black Book was ostensibly developed to keep organized crime out of the Nevada gaming industry. If your name is placed in the book, it’s a crime for you to enter a casino. The process of who gets included has always been arbitrary, even hypocritical. As Ronald Farrell and Carole Case write in The Black Book and the Mob: The Untold Story of the Control of Nevada’s Casinos, “Not all who might have presented a serious threat to gaming at the time were placed in the Black Book.” Given so many early Vegas investors’ pasts in bootlegging and illegal gambling, “This would have been impossible.” Instead, the Black Book has always been leveraged to target certain groups and manipulate the balance of power. Only one thing is for certain: once you’re in, it’s virtually impossible to get out.

When word came down that he was going in the book, Tommy didn’t contest it. “It’s a no-win situation,” he said, “a kangaroo court.” He’d already lost his house and his car. Resigned, he moved back to Tulsa. The American Dream was over.

Make Light Wand Slot Machines For Sale

But the Edison of the Strip had one last burst of inspiration. Claiming he’d had a change of heart and wanted to “right a wrong,” Tommy invented “The Protector,” an anti-cheating device for slot machines. At the time, he estimated that he was responsible for ninety percent of cheating devices in circulation, and that The Protector was the one solution he’d always been afraid the manufacturers would discover. When any sort of light shone inside the machine, The Protector would prompt the unit to shut down. In 2002, Tommy sold his patent, which ended up in the possession of iGames Entertainment. The device was approved by Nevada regulators and sold to Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines for use in its casinos.

Yet Carmichael, who died in 2019, survived by his two dogs, Mojo and Scochie, never stopped haunting the slot machine industry’s unconscious. When the Nevada Gaming Commission discovered that iGames Entertainment’s anti-cheating device had been invented by Carmichael, they launched an investigation into its legitimacy. Said one member of the Gaming Control Board, “There’s little doubt in our minds that Tommy Carmichael has the knowledge and the ability to reprogram it.”

Light Wand By Germ Guardian

Was The Protector just Tommy’s most elaborate scheme yet, a Trojan Horse for every slot? His patent application contains expertly drawn diagrams, the fruit of a lifetime spent with slots, indicating precisely how The Protector would fit into the machine. And then he concludes, “Further objects, features, and advantages of the present invention will be apparent to those skilled in the art upon examining the accompanying drawings.”

How To Make A Light Wand For Slot Machines

Michael LaPointe is a writer in Toronto. His debut novel, The Creep, will be published by Random House Canada in 2021