Tuesday, February 15, 2011

BUST OUT SCHEME AT CONNECTICUT CASINOS?

Illegal Chinese Immigrant Pleads Guilty In Casino 'Bust-Out' Scheme
Foxwoods Resort Casino By EDMUND H. MAHONY, emahony@courant.com

The Hartford Courant

7:43 p.m. EST, February 14, 2011

HARTFORD — An illegal Chinese immigrant pleaded guilty on Monday to running a "bust-out" scheme that enabled gamblers to collect hundreds of thousands of dollars by cashing out phony bank transfers at the state's two casinos.

Federal prosecutors said Zhao Guang Ming, a 34-year-old resident of Queens known as Mr. Zhang, admitted in court in Hartford that he defrauded an unspecified number of banks of more than $200,000 in the scheme, in which criminals repeatedly obtained fraudulent cash advances at casinos in Ledyard and Montville.

A federal law enforcement affidavit said that the powerful, overhead video surveillance system at the Foxwoods Resort Casino collected a key piece of evidence against Zhao. The system has such high resolution that authorities were able to read the screen on Zhao's mobile telephone device as he used the Internet to enter the information necessary to initiate a fraudulent bank transfer.

"The surveillance video was zoomed in to a sufficient level to allow the viewer to read" the information on the screen of Zhao's mobile device, according to an affidavit prepared by an agent of the Department of Homeland Security, which conducted the investigation.

No comments: