Man poses at hotel owner in $1M scam

Philip Roth is rolling over in his grave

 

RUMOUR on Twitter from an unreliable source says this happened at 4 Las Vegas casinos (on and off strip, unreported) as well as the one in Mesquite.

 

Yep… and if true, it magnifies the craziness of this! And that $$$ is likely “in the wind.”

 

Interesting how that MGM Resorts email doesn't say anything about reassuring employees that they won't be fired for following procedure...

Although it might not be explicitly said on these phone calls, I'm sure the fear of "What if I get fired for contradicting my boss who is apparently on the phone?" plays a big role in influencing staff to not push back. Perhaps some may go as far as to say "Listen, I need you to cooperate, and if you don't release these funds you will be fired!"... and for an employee who doesn't know any better, that puts them in a really tough spot.

The more easily they can be manipulated, the more likely the heist will be pulled off... and I think strengthening that link in the chain would make a big difference.

 

Social engineering works. So many folks are so naive when dealing with the ploys.

Now that one in Blackhawk just shows stupidity. She had to know that anyone handling cash would be filmed!

 

I read elsewhere that email was actually sent by LVMPD. Which makes sense because MGM wouldn’t instruct their employees to directly email a detective.

 

So why not specifically spell this out in very simple terms: "All requests / demands for cash removal from the cage will be [insert policy here] to include requests from [insert identifier here]".

When dinosaurs ruled the earth, right out of the Army, I had a gig as a security guard. The guard orders were specific in that there was no admittance to the property after 20:00 by anyone. So, one of our supervisors shows up and wants to come in. I refused his entry. Why? What are my orders? And, again, being right out of the Army, I assumed that this being some sort of "test" was not entirely out of the question. So no, no entry. After about ten minutes he stormed off, and I got a talking to the next day that "what those orders mean, former Sergeant Robinson, is that by "anyone" we mean employees of the company only. Our supervisors can come into the facility, OK? Clear?"

But, if you're someone of x-years of age, maybe the threat of being fired from the job weighs more heavily than when you're twenty-some years old and the road is wide open. But in 2023, falling for anything over the phone is really, really suspect. C'mon man.

 

If you ask me, I think you did the right thing. They said no admittance, and you granted no admittance.

Though as I read your anecdote and could tell where it was going... the only thing I could think of was this Lavell Crawford clip

 

This 100%. I've had supervisory positions in a large organization where I had access to almost unlimited amounts of cash. The higher ups in the organization were wise enough to have iron-clad procedures in place for expenditures. Anything over $X required two signatures. Anything over $Y required three signatures. It's not that complicated. Is it a hassle at times to get that second or third approval? Sure, but that's the price of security. There's no way a single incompetent/dishonest employee should be able to lose/steal that kind of money.

 

If it was sent by LVMPD, they wouldn't have the authority to guarantee the job of someone at a private company.

 

My job, from which I recently retired, did not involve any significant cash handling, but I do remember memos going out, in recent years, to always get upper management in the loop for any out-of-procedure or "emergency" payments such as wire transfers, cash/check picked up by courier, etc., no matter who the request appears to come from.

 

I would BET there are these safeguards in place in Vegas casinos (they are just corporations after all; traded on WallStreet.)
It just comes down to employee incompetence..pay peanuts, get elephants

 

Everyone is focused on how the cage supervisor thought the thief was credible as the owner and I'm over here wondering how the cage supervisor even contemplated that it was within her duties to come up with payments for vendors or the local government in the first place.

It is possible that I don't understand casino operations, but I would have expected that cage operations and writing checks to vendors would be two entirely separate departments. If you told me that it was normal for the person responsible for accounts payable to go down to the cage to grab a couple stacks to pay the utility bill each month for the casino, I'd say you were blowing smoke.

You would think the call would have gone like this:

"Yes, I'd like to speak with the cage supervisor"

"Yes, this is the cage supervisor"

"Hello cage supervisor person, I need $500,000 to pay for fire safety equipment. Can you get a few stacks together for me?"

"Uhh...shouldn't you be talking to the accounting or purchasing department? I run the cage sir."

 

No no, I don't mean that in my organization you were supposed to get multiple approvals before a check could be cut, an electronic transfer could be made, or cash could be withdrawn. The system would not allow it without the proper approvals. Multiple supervisors (like I said, at least two, sometimes three) had to sign into the system and click "I approve" to release the funds. If you have security procedures that can simply be ignored or overridden by a single incompetent or dishonest employee, you don't have security procedures at all.

 

Just curious (and I respect if you’d rather not answer this)… did this functionality have a “duress” option? I.E., if someone is being coerced into clicking this button somehow, giving the appearance that authorization was given, but then quietly signalling that something is up

 

No, there wasn't. If someone got three supervisors in a room and put a gun to our heads and forced us to sign off on the expenditure, it would work. But now you have three witnesses, and that's not really the type of threat the system was meant to eliminate. I'm guessing embezzlement/incompetence (like Circa) losses outweigh losses from situations like you describe by a factor of 100x or more, but I don't know for sure. I do know that the entire time I worked there we had no known losses from embezzlement or coercion.

 

UPDATE

"A scheme to dupe casino employees into thinking they were transferring money from cages to a legitimate business involves at least three casinos and Mexican phone numbers."

From KLAS

https://www.8newsnow.com/investigators/las-vegas-area-casino-cage-scheme-involves-at-least-3-properties-mexican-phone-numbers/