Rented/Bought Movies Yesterday

Yesterday I rented two movies and bought (for only $5.99) 21, the Kevin Spacey movie about card counting in casinos. And this morning I come across the following related story:

The co-founder of a criminal enterprise known as the Tran Organization pled guilty last month to scamming casinos across the country out of millions of dollars, bringing to a close one of the largest card-cheating cases in recent FBI history.

Van Thu Tran, 45, along with her husband, parents, extended family, and others, participated in a surprisingly simple scheme to cheat casinos at the gaming tables.

Tran and her husband were dealers at an Indian tribal casino in San Diego in 2002 when they devised a plan to use a false shuffle to track cards and thereby guarantee successful betting.

Initially, it was a pretty bare bones operation, said Special Agent Peter Casey, one of several case agents who worked the Tran investigation out of our San Diego Field Office.

Over time, the couple branched out from an Asian card game called Pai Gow to blackjack, and they enlisted many others in the scheme including dealers at other casinos with the promise of easy money.

For awhile, the money was easy, because some of the tribal casinos security was not yet sophisticated enough to pick up on the scam. Before the ring was rounded up in 2007, some 29 casinos from Canada to Mississippi were hit for about $7 million.