Trump’s Guantanamo Detention Center Executive Order

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Fleury-Merogis located in France is the largest prison in Europe. While French leadership say they don’t want a newer version of Guantanamo, perhaps they should just visit the facility in Cuba. This article regarding common criminals in France housed with terrorists is a summary with 2 opposing views given how the inmates there are managed. What is really at issue for sentencing of terrorists in Europe is the how short the time really is for those involved in terror and militant actions.

In the United States, we are soon to be facing another scary condition, the release of terrorists after serving their full sentence. Now what? Well, I had the pleasure of interview Patrick Dunleavey on this very topic. (Segment 3 and 4)

The draft executive order for Guantanamo is found here. It is not in final form, nor has it been signed.

NYT/WASHINGTON — The Trump White House is nearing completion of an order that would direct the Pentagon to bring future Islamic State detainees to the Guantánamo Bay prison, despite warnings from national security officials and legal scholars that doing so risks undermining the effort to combat the group, according to administration officials and a draft executive order obtained by The New York Times.

White House officials have detailed their thinking about a new detainee policy in an evolving series of drafts of an executive order being circulated among national security officials for comment. While previous versions have shown that the draft has undergone many changes — including dropping language about reviving C.I.A. prisons — the plan to add Islamic State detainees to the Guantánamo population has remained constant.

The latest version of the draft, which circulated this week, would direct Defense Secretary Jim Mattis to use Guantánamo to detain suspected members of “Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and associated forces, including individuals and networks associated with the Islamic State.”

The White House has kept similar language in the draft order despite warnings from career government national security officials that carrying out its plan would give federal judges an opportunity to reject the executive branch’s theory that the war against the Islamic State is legal, even though Congress never explicitly authorized it. The issue could arise when reviewing an inevitable habeas corpus lawsuit filed by an ISIS detainee.

The Obama administration first argued in late summer 2014 that the Islamic State was part of the existing armed conflict that Congress authorized in 2001 against Al Qaeda and the Taliban. But while the Islamic State got its start as Al Qaeda’s affiliate in Iraq more than a decade ago, that theory is disputed because the two groups later split and went to war with each other.

“It raises huge legal risks,” said Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard Law School professor and former senior Justice Department official in the Bush administration. “If a judge says the Sept. 11 authorization does not cover such a detention, it would not only make that detention unlawful, it would weaken the legal basis for the entire war against the Islamic State.”

Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, did not respond to an email seeking comment on the issue.

The Times reported on Feb. 4 that the White House had limited the draft order so that it focused on carrying out President Trump’s vow to keep the Guantánamo prison open and use it for newly captured detainees. That draft of the order dropped the ideas of reopening C.I.A. prisons and permitting interrogators to use harsher techniques than those now allowed in the Army Field Manual.

That report was based on accounts by people familiar with a version that circulated last week. But a new draft order circulated this week, titled “Protecting America Through Lawful Detention of Terrorist and Other Designated Enemy Elements,” includes some revisions. The latest version, unlike the previous one, explicitly revokes President Barack Obama’s January 2009 executive order directing the government to close the prison by January 2010, a deadline it failed to meet.

The revised text also dropped references to revitalizing the use of the military commissions system at Guantánamo for prosecuting terrorism suspects, and instead focused exclusively on detention policy — like its directive to use the prison to detain captured Islamic State suspects without trial.

In the 2012 version of the annual National Defense Authorization Act, Congress bolstered the government’s power to imprison suspected members of Al Qaeda, the Taliban and associated forces by authorizing such detentions without reference to the Sept. 11 attacks. But while it has provided funds for military operations against the Islamic State, it has never explicitly authorized combat or detention operations against it.

In summer 2014, when the group swept out of Syria and began rapidly conquering swaths of Iraq, Mr. Obama launched a bombing campaign to curtail its advances. At the time, he put forth the theory that the group’s early ties to Al Qaeda were sufficient to bring it under the Sept. 11 war authorization without new action from Congress.

Nevertheless, in 2015, the Obama administration asked Congress to enact an authorization for use of military force against the Islamic State. Lawmakers disagreed about whether it should place limits on the use of ground forces or impose an expiration date, and Congress never acted on the proposal. Congress has continued to give no sign that it has the will or the consensus to explicitly authorize war on the Islamic State.

Last year, an army captain sued Mr. Obama, arguing that the war was illegal because Congress had not authorized it. A Federal District Court judge dismissed the lawsuit without ruling on the legal merits, saying the plaintiff lacked standing to bring the case.

But any Islamic State detainee at Guantánamo would have legal standing to get a court to rule on the question of whether the group is legitimately part of the war against Al Qaeda.

Ryan Goodman, a New York University law professor who worked at the Pentagon during the Obama administration, said there were other reasons bringing an Islamic State detainee to Guantánamo for indefinite detention, as opposed to prosecuting him in civilian court, might raise problems: Foreign allies, he said, might refuse to turn over prisoners or assist in detention operations if that was the administration’s goal.

But even if that turns out not to be the case, he said, the legal risks of bringing a suspected member of the Islamic State, sometimes referred to as ISIL, are “very serious.”

Trump Targeting BLM and Drug Cartels with Executive Action

These 3 signatures today on Executive Orders will aid the newly sworn in U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions. As a matter of personal opinion, President Trump did not go far enough, he should have declared all known drug cartels and their operatives terror organizations and should have done the same with Black Lives Matter along with known gang operations and members. Yet, Trump promised to restore law and order and this is a step in the right direction.

Related reading: Chicago Murder Capitol due to Gangs and Illegals

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Trump signs executive orders on crime, law enforcement

CBS: President Trump signed three executive actions Thursday aimed at bolstering law enforcement and targeting violent crime and criminal drug cartels.

The first executive order, according to what Mr. Trump outlined during the signing ceremony in the Oval Office, is meant to direct the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security to “undertake all necessary and lawful action to break the back of the criminal cartels that have spread across our nation and are destroying the blood of our youth and many other people.”

The president signed the action Thursday after swearing in Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Among other powers, the action gives broad authority to increase intelligence and lawn enforcement information sharing with foreign powers in order to crack down on “transnational criminal organizations” and their subsidiaries. It also instructs an interagency panel to compile a report on crime syndicates within four months.

“These groups are drivers of crime, corruption, violence, and misery,” the order reads. “In particular, the trafficking by cartels of controlled substances has triggered a resurgence in deadly drug abuse and a corresponding rise in violent crime related to drugs.”

Mr. Trump hinted at exercising his executive power to combat drug cartels earlier this week while talking with Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly.

“We have to do something about the cartels,” the president said in the interview, a portion of which aired Monday. He said he’d spoken with his Mexican counterpart, President Enrique Peña Nieto, about working together on the issue.

“We’ve got to stop the drugs from coming into our country,” Mr. Trump told O’Reilly. “And if he can’t handle it — maybe they can and maybe they can’t or maybe he needs help — he seemed very willing to get help from us, because he has got a problem and it’s a real problem for us.”

The president signed two other actions Thursday, including one that creates a task force within the Justice Department dedicated to “reducing violent crime in America.”

The “Task Force on Crime Reduction and Public Safety” will have administrative and financial support from the Attorney General’s office, according to the text of the order.

The last action directs the DOJ to implement a plan to “stop crime and crimes of violence against law enforcement officers.”

The order itself instructs the department to “pursue appropriate legislation…that will define new Federal crimes, and increase penalties for existing Federal crimes, in order to prevent violence against Federal, State, tribal, and local law enforcement officers.” That recommended legislation could include “defining new crimes of violence and establishing new mandatory minimum sentences for existing crimes of violence.”

The order also directs a thorough evaluation of all grant funding programs currently administered by the Justice Department.

“It’s a shame what’s been happening to our great — truly great — law enforcement officers,” the president said at the signing. “That’s going to stop as of today.”

Red Cross Stops Operations, 1000’s More Troops Need, A’Stan

Primer: Red Cross Suspends Operations In Afghanistan After Six Employees Killed

Afghanistan hosts the Red Cross's fourth-largest humanitarian program in the world. (file photo)

Afghanistan hosts the Red Cross’s fourth-largest humanitarian program in the world. (file photo)

The International Committee of the Red Cross suspended operations in Afghanistan after gunmen killed six employees helping to deliver emergency relief to a remote northern region hit by heavy snowstorms.

The governor of Jowzjan Province said the aid convoy was attacked by suspected Islamic State gunmen. The head of the Red Cross called the incident the “worst attack against us” in 20 years.

A search operation was under way to find two charity workers who were still missing late on February 8.

“Our operations are on hold, indeed, because we need to understand what exactly happened before we can hopefully resume our operations,” the charity’s director of operations, Dominik Stillhart, said. More here.

WASHINGTON, Feb. 9, 2017 — A few thousand more troops for the train, advise and assist mission in Afghanistan would help to break what is now a stalemate with the Taliban, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant and other adversaries there, the commander of NATO’s Resolute Support mission and of U.S. forces in Afghanistan said here today.

Army Gen. John W. Nicholson Jr. testified this morning before the Senate Armed Services Committee on the situation in Afghanistan.

U.S. and NATO troops perform two complementary missions in Afghanistan, Nicholson said: the U.S. counterterrorism mission, called Operation Freedom’s Sentinel, and the NATO train, advise and assist mission, called Operation Resolute Support.

“I have adequate resourcing in my counterterrorism mission,” the general said. But the train, advise and assist mission has a shortfall of a few thousand troops, he added, noting that the extra troops could come from the United States and its allies, many of whom are fighting in Afghanistan.

Bolstering Offensive Capability

Nicholson said offensive capability will break the stalemate in Afghanistan, and the Afghan security forces’ key offensive capabilities are their special forces and air force.

“As a result of our training, equipping and partnering, the 17,000-strong Afghan special forces are the best in the region,” the general told the Senate panel. “They now operate independently on roughly 80 percent of their missions.”

The Afghan air force also is gaining capability, he added, noting that its first ground-attack aircraft entered the fight in April and the force is now integrating intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance assets into new targeting processes.

According to a Defense Department statement issued Dec. 19, the fiscal year 2017 budget amendment requests $264 million to procure 53 UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters and to begin to refurbish and modify some of them. The request also would fund more aircraft already in the Afghan inventory, including 30 more armed MD-530 helicopters for $227 million, six more A-29 fixed-wing close-attack aircraft for $174.5 million, and five AC-208 fixed-wing aircraft for $80 million.

The request includes $69 million to train aircrew and maintenance personnel, and DoD officials said it will seek funding for more UH-60s and AC-208s in future fiscal years.

“Congressional approval of funding for the Afghan air force is key to improving the offensive capability of the Afghan national defense and security forces, [and] there is an urgency to this request in order to get these aircraft and aircrews into the fight as soon as possible,” Nicholson said.

The investment in the Afghan air force will help them take over responsibility for their own close air support, “and even more important, will lead to an offensive capability that allows them to overmatch the Taliban or any other group on the battlefield, anywhere around the country,” the general said.

No Safe Haven

Nicholson said the main objective in Afghanistan is to keep the nation from being used as a safe haven from which terrorists could attack the United States and its allies.

“Of the 98 U.S.-designated terrorist groups globally, 20 operate in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region, along with three violent extremist organizations,” Nicholson told the senators.

This is the highest concentration of terrorist groups anywhere in the world, and it underscores the counterterrorism platform’s importance in the Central Asia-South Asia region, because it protects the American homeland, he added.

“We remain very focused on the defeat of al-Qaida and its associates, as well as the defeat of Islamic State Khorasan Province, which is the ISIL affiliate in Afghanistan,” he said.

Many nations are committed to Afghanistan’s success, Nicholson said.

At NATO’s July summit in Warsaw, Poland, the alliance reaffirmed its commitment to sustain the Afghan national defense and security forces through 2020. At an October conference in Brussels, 75 countries and organizations confirmed their intention to provide $15.2 billion to Afghanistan development needs. And India dedicated another $1 billion on top of the $2 billion it already had given to Afghan development needs.

“These expressions of international commitment reflect the importance the world places on stability in Afghanistan and confidence in the Afghan people and Afghan government,” Nicholson said, noting that the NATO mission has an exceptional partnership with Afghan President Ashraf Ghani, Chief Executive Abdullah Abdullah, and the security forces and people of Afghanistan.

No. 1 Goal

The general said the No. 1 goal of the Afghanistan fight is to protect the homeland from any attack emanating from the region.

An Afghan soldier searches people receiving supplies in Afghanistan’s Parwan province during a humanitarian aid mission, Jan. 28, 2017. Army photo by Sgt. 1st Class Eliodoro Molina

An Afghan soldier searches people receiving supplies in Afghanistan’s Parwan province during a humanitarian aid mission, Jan. 28, 2017. Army photo by Sgt. 1st Class Eliodoro Molina

 

“We have achieved that in the last 15 years, [but] we need to stay on top of that, because of this confluence of 20 terrorist groups in the region,” he said. “I believe this is an enduring commitment to keep pressure on these groups and help the Afghans move toward a successful end state.”

Success in Afghanistan might be the maintenance of the enduring counterterrorism effort to keep pressure on terrorist groups, Nicholson said.

“It means that we would destroy the Islamic State and al-Qaida inside Afghanistan, something we’re actively pursuing every day. It means that we would help the Afghan security forces and government to extend their control to a larger and larger percentage of the population,” he said. It means the NATO mission would help Afghanistan become a more stable and prosperous entity in a critical part of the world, he added.

“I recognize the distance of Afghanistan and the length of this [war] has been challenging for the American people to support,” Nicholson said. “However, I personally believe that this effort we’re undertaking there is protecting the homeland and preventing these terrorists from bringing their fight to our doorstep.”

 

You Playing the Slot Machine Next to that Russian?

Russian organized crime is not a new phenomenon by any stretch and does operate in the United States. In 2011:

Russian organized crime syndicates and criminally linked oligarchs may attempt to collude with state or state-allied actors to undermine competition in strategic markets like natural gas, oil, aluminum, and precious metals, the National Security Council attests. At the same time, transnational criminal networks in Russia are establishing new ties to global drug trafficking networks to raise quick capital. Nuclear material trafficking is an especially prominent concern in the former Soviet Union, the report stated, adding that the US would continue to cooperate with Moscow and the nations of the region to combat illicit drugs and organized crime.

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The report singled out the Russian mob run by Semion Mogilevich. He is wanted by the US for fraud, racketeering, and money laundering and was recently added to the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list.

Mogilevich and several members of his organization were charged in 2003 in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania in a 45-count racketeering indictment with involvement in a sophisticated securities fraud and money-laundering scheme, in which they allegedly used a Pennsylvania company, YBM Magnex, to defraud investors of more than $150 million. Even after that indictment—and being placed on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list—Mogilevich has continued to expand his operations. Mogilevich was arrested by Russian police on tax charges in January 2008 and was released pending trial in July 2009. Other members of his organization remain at large.

Mogilevich’s criminal empire currently operates in Europe (including Italy, Chech Republic, Switzerland and Russia) the United States, the Ukraine, Israel and the United Kingdom. He also allegedly has ties with organized crime in South America, Pakistan and Japan. Mogilevich is considered one of the smartest and most powerful gangsters in the world. More here from Forbes.

**** Meanwhile, about those casinos and the fun slot machines, at least for those who cheat…

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Wired: In early June 2014, accountants at the Lumiere Place Casino in St. Louis noticed that several of their slot machines had—just for a couple of days—gone haywire. The government-approved software that powers such machines gives the house a fixed mathematical edge, so that casinos can be certain of how much they’ll earn over the long haul—say, 7.129 cents for every dollar played. But on June 2 and 3, a number of Lumiere’s machines had spit out far more money than they’d consumed, despite not awarding any major jackpots, an aberration known in industry parlance as a negative hold. Since code isn’t prone to sudden fits of madness, the only plausible explanation was that someone was cheating.

Casino security pulled up the surveillance tapes and eventually spotted the culprit, a black-haired man in his thirties who wore a Polo zip-up and carried a square brown purse. Unlike most slots cheats, he didn’t appear to tinker with any of the machines he targeted, all of which were older models manufactured by Aristocrat Leisure of Australia. Instead he’d simply play, pushing the buttons on a game like Star Drifter or Pelican Pete while furtively holding his iPhone close to the screen.

He’d walk away after a few minutes, then return a bit later to give the game a second chance. That’s when he’d get lucky. The man would parlay a $20 to $60 investment into as much as $1,300 before cashing out and moving on to another machine, where he’d start the cycle anew. Over the course of two days, his winnings tallied just over $21,000. The only odd thing about his behavior during his streaks was the way he’d hover his finger above the Spin button for long stretches before finally jabbing it in haste; typical slots players don’t pause between spins like that.

On June 9, Lumiere Place shared its findings with the Missouri Gaming Commission, which in turn issued a statewide alert. Several casinos soon discovered that they had been cheated the same way, though often by different men than the one who’d bilked Lumiere Place. In each instance, the perpetrator held a cell phone close to an Aristocrat Mark VI model slot machine shortly before a run of good fortune.

By examining rental-car records, Missouri authorities identified the Lumiere Place scammer as Murat Bliev, a 37-year-old Russian national. Bliev had flown back to Moscow on June 6, but the St. Petersburg–based organization he worked for, which employs dozens of operatives to manipulate slot machines around the world, quickly sent him back to the United States to join another cheating crew. The decision to redeploy Bliev to the US would  prove to be a rare misstep for a venture that’s quietly making millions by cracking some of the gaming industry’s most treasured algorithms.

From Russia With Cheats

Russia has been a hotbed of slots-related malfeasance since 2009, when the country outlawed virtually all gambling. (Vladimir Putin, who was prime minister at the time, reportedly believed the move would reduce the power of Georgian organized crime.) The ban forced thousands of casinos to sell their slot machines at steep discounts to whatever customers they could find. Some of those cut-rate slots wound up in the hands of counterfeiters eager to learn how to load new games onto old circuit boards. Others apparently went to Murat Bliev’s bosses in St. Petersburg, who were keen to probe the machines’ source code for vulnerabilities.

By early 2011, casinos throughout central and eastern Europe were logging incidents in which slots made by the Austrian company Novomatic paid out improbably large sums. Novomatic’s engineers could find no evidence that the machines in question had been tampered with, leading them to theorize that the cheaters had figured out how to predict the slots’ behavior. “Through targeted and prolonged observation of the individual game sequences as well as possibly recording individual games, it might be possible to allegedly identify a kind of ‘pattern’ in the game results,” the company admitted in a February 2011 notice to its customers.

Recognizing those patterns would require remarkable effort. Slot machine outcomes are controlled by programs called pseudorandom number generators that produce baffling results by design. Government regulators, such as the Missouri Gaming Commission, vet the integrity of each algorithm before casinos can deploy it.

But as the “pseudo” in the name suggests, the numbers aren’t truly random. Because human beings create them using coded instructions, PRNGs can’t help but be a bit deterministic. (A true random number generator must be rooted in a phenomenon that is not manmade, such as radioactive decay.) PRNGs take an initial number, known as a seed, and then mash it together with various hidden and shifting inputs—the time from a machine’s internal clock, for example—in order to produce a result that appears impossible to forecast. But if hackers can identify the various ingredients in that mathematical stew, they can potentially predict a PRNG’s output. That process of reverse engineering becomes much easier, of course, when a hacker has physical access to a slot machine’s innards.

Knowing the secret arithmetic that a slot machine uses to create pseudorandom results isn’t enough to help hackers, though. That’s because the inputs for a PRNG vary depending on the temporal state of each machine. The seeds are different at different times, for example, as is the data culled from the internal clocks. So even if they understand how a machine’s PRNG functions, hackers would also have to analyze the machine’s gameplay to discern its pattern. That requires both time and substantial computing power, and pounding away on one’s laptop in front of a Pelican Pete is a good way to attract the attention of casino security.

The Lumiere Place scam showed how Murat Bliev and his cohorts got around that challenge. After hearing what had happened in Missouri, a casino security expert named Darrin Hoke, who was then director of surveillance at L’Auberge du Lac Casino Resort in Lake Charles, Louisiana, took it upon himself to investigate the scope of the hacking operation. By interviewing colleagues who had reported suspicious slot machine activity and by examining their surveillance photos, he was able to identify 25 alleged operatives who’d worked in casinos from California to Romania to Macau. Hoke also used hotel registration records to discover that two of Bliev’s accomplices from St. Louis had remained in the US and traveled west to the Pechanga Resort & Casino in Temecula, California. On July 14, 2014, agents from the California Department of Justice detained one of those operatives at Pechanga and confiscated four of his cell phones, as well as $6,000. (The man, a Russian national, was not indicted; his current whereabouts are unknown.)

The cell phones from Pechanga, combined with intelligence from investigations in Missouri and Europe, revealed key details. According to Willy Allison, a Las Vegas–based casino security consultant who has been tracking the Russian scam for years, the operatives use their phones to record about two dozen spins on a game they aim to cheat. They upload that footage to a technical staff in St. Petersburg, who analyze the video and calculate the machine’s pattern based on what they know about the model’s pseudorandom number generator. Finally, the St. Petersburg team transmits a list of timing markers to a custom app on the operative’s phone; those markers cause the handset to vibrate roughly 0.25 seconds before the operative should press the spin button.

“The normal reaction time for a human is about a quarter of a second, which is why they do that,” says Allison, who is also the founder of the annual World Game Protection Conference. The timed spins are not always successful, but they result in far more payouts than a machine normally awards: Individual scammers typically win more than $10,000 per day. (Allison notes that those operatives try to keep their winnings on each machine to less than $1,000, to avoid arousing suspicion.) A four-person team working multiple casinos can earn upwards of $250,000  in a single week.

Repeat Business

Since there are no slot machines to swindle in his native country, Murat Bliev didn’t linger long in Russia after his return from St. Louis. He made two more trips to the US in 2014, the second of which began on December 3. He went straight from Chicago O’Hare Airport to St. Charles, Missouri, where he met up with three other men who’d been trained to scam Aristocrat’s Mark VI model slot machines: Ivan Gudalov, Igor Larenov, and Yevgeniy Nazarov. The quartet planned to spend the next several days hitting various casinos in Missouri and western Illinois.

Bliev should never have come back. On December 10, not long after security personnel spotted Bliev inside the Hollywood Casino in St. Louis, the four scammers were arrested. Because Bliev and his cohorts had pulled their scam across state lines, federal authorities charged them with conspiracy to commit fraud. The indictments represented the first significant setbacks for the St. Petersburg organization; never before had any of its operatives faced prosecution.

Bliev, Gudalov, and Larenov, all of whom are Russian citizens, eventually accepted plea bargains and were each sentenced to two years in federal prison, to be followed by deportation. Nazarov, a Kazakh who was granted religious asylum in the US in 2013 and is a Florida resident, still awaits sentencing, which indicates that he is cooperating with the authorities: In a statement to WIRED, Aristocrat representatives noted that one of the four defendants has yet to be sentenced because he “continues to assist the FBI with their investigations.”

Whatever information Nazarov provides may be too outdated to be of much value. In the two years since the Missouri arrests, the St. Petersburg organization’s field operatives have become much cagier. Some of their new tricks were revealed last year, when Singaporean authorities caught and prosecuted a crew: One member, a Czech named Radoslav Skubnik, spilled details about the organization’s financial structure (90 percent of all revenue goes back to St. Petersburg) as well as operational tactics. “What they’ll do now is they’ll put the cell phone in their shirt’s chest pocket, behind a little piece  of mesh,” says Allison. “So they don’t have to hold it in their hand while they record.” And Darrin Hoke, the security expert, says he has received reports that scammers may be streaming video back to Russia via Skype, so they no longer need to step away from a slot machine to upload their footage.

The Missouri and Singapore cases appear to be the only instances in which scammers have been prosecuted, though a few have also been caught and banned by individual casinos. At the same time, the St. Petersburg organization has sent its operatives farther and farther afield. In recent months, for example, at least three casinos in Peru have reported being cheated by Russian gamblers who played aging Novomatic Coolfire slot machines.

The economic realities of the gaming industry seem to guarantee that the St. Petersburg organization will continue to flourish. The machines have no easy technical fix. As Hoke notes, Aristocrat, Novomatic, and any other manufacturers whose PRNGs have been cracked “would have to pull all  the machines out of service and put something else in, and they’re not going to do that.” (In Aristocrat’s statement to WIRED, the company stressed that it has been unable “to identify defects in the targeted games” and that its machines “are built to and approved against rigid regulatory technical standards.”) At the same time, most casinos can’t afford to invest in the newest slot machines, whose PRNGs use encryption to protect mathematical secrets; as long as older, compromised machines are still popular with customers, the smart financial move for casinos is to keep using them and accept the occasional loss to scammers.

So the onus will be on casino security personnel to keep an eye peeled for the scam’s small tells. A finger that lingers too long above a spin button may be a guard’s only clue that hackers in St. Petersburg are about to make another score.