Newbie looking for security experiences from Veterans (1 Viewer)

[droppingdeuces]

I am putting a paper together for a College/University course that is assessing the security of various forms of currency - paper bills, bitcoin, coins, etc. The concept of poker chips as a true currency is interesting, and I was wondering if anyone had experience with security features used in chips, specifically any machine-readable features like they have on paper bills. I have seen chips with UV on them, color-shifting ink, etc., but I don't have access to anything that would help detect something more covert. Even anecdotal stories would help my cause, thanks in advance!

 

[tabletalker7]

I am putting a paper together for a College/University course that is assessing the security of various forms of currency - paper bills, bitcoin, coins, etc. The concept of poker chips as a true currency is interesting, and I was wondering if anyone had experience with security features used in chips, specifically any machine-readable features like they have on paper bills. I have seen chips with UV on them, color-shifting ink, etc., but I don't have access to anything that would help detect something more covert. Even anecdotal stories would help my cause, thanks in advance!

You do know about RFID in high denomination chips, right?

 

[allforcharity]

Some old plaques have serial numbers.

 

[Highli99]

Get out yer black light! Many chips have fluorescent ink features as well.

 

[CrazyEddie]

RFID is the main high-tech security feature these days. You can even find them in low-cost low-end chips.

Interestingly, one of the main security features of high-end poker chips is simply that they're difficult to make! So-called "clay" chips (which are actually made of a mixture of plastic and clay) are made using compression molding. The chips are formed into blanks, then the blanks plus the inlay are placed in a mold inside a heated press. The process looks like this:

And here's an example of a mold that the blanks are pressed in:

The result is an object that has multiple characteristics that are easy to observe but difficult to reproduce without having access to the same type of equipment and a very close duplicate of the mold. The equipment is expensive to buy or manufacture, and expensive and difficult to operate.

In other words, the chips themselves are hard to counterfeit without a substantial investment - which dramatically reduces the likelihood of successful opportunistic counterfeiting!

What can you look for on a compressed clay poker chip to ensure it's authentic?

• The inlay is inlaid, meaning it is pressed into the surface of the chip during the molding and pressing. It sits flush with the chip's surface. The transition from the inlay to the surrounding chip material is seamless. Only compression molding can accomplish this. Injection-molded chips have decals rather than inlays; they're essentially stickers, and they're adhered to the surface of the chip. It's trivial to spot the difference, and even if someone is extremely careful in cutting and applying the sticker to try and make it fit precisely within the injection-molded chip's recess, if you look closely you'll be able to tell. In fact, you can even tell without looking, just by feeling! Running a finger or fingernail across the face of the chip, you will feel a gap or seam on the stickered chip whereas you'll feel a smooth flat surface on the genuine chip.
  
  
• The inlay is textured. The mold's surface has a texture to it, and it imparts that texture uniformly to both the surface of the chip and the surface of the inlay. The texture has a grain. If anyone were to remove and replace the inlay, it would not have the same texture as the original; the texture on the counterfeit inlay would not match the texture of the surrounding chip, and even if you replaced it with a real inlay from a different chip using the same mold (so that it had the same texture) the grain of the texture would not match either in position or direction.
  
  
• The edge spots have natural variation. When the chip is pressed, the "clay" is squished before being melted together and then cured solid by the heat of the press. That squishiness means that every chip is slightly different, and you can easily see the difference between any two otherwise identical chips by looking at the borders of the colored spots. They'll be ragged, and they'll be unique. Injection-molded chips will be identical because their spots are part of the mold; by looking at any two examples, you'll see that they are exactly the same whereas you'd expect genuine compression-molded chips will show small but easily observed differences.
  
  
• They have distinctive molds. In the example above, the chip's mold is a number of horseheads running around the edge. There are many different edge mold designs, but they all have something in common - they're simple enough to assess visually but complex enough that a counterfeiter would have to invest substantial effort and care in order to reproduce them. Obviously that's possible - people duplicate currency, after all - but it serves as a strong deterrent to casual or opportunistic forgeries.

Taken together, these sorts of features ensure that if a high-end clay poker chip looks real, then it almost certainly is real. And for a long time, this was the only level of assurance that casinos and card rooms had! Clay chips go back a hundred years, and from the very early days the manufacturers touted to their customers that by adding in distinctive features such as the insignia or stamp of the card room - i.e. customizing the chips for each specific customer - the casino could defeat the scourge of "ringers" - chips that were brought in from outside and then passed off as genuine inside. And they did! The security rested upon the difficulty of manufacturing the chips. An object that is so seemingly simple turns out to be expensive to produce - and difficult to duplicate without going through that very same expense!

But casinos are rightly paranoid because counterfeiters are highly motivated and very clever. So over time the manufacturers added things like microdots and holograms and etched serial numbers and eventually RFID. But the very first security feature in the very first chip was simply... being a poker chip! A high-quality artifact with visible characteristics from its method of production.

Good luck with your paper! We'd be interested to read it when it's done, if you feel like sharing.

 

[CrazyEddie]

That said, there have been a few examples where people have attempted to counterfeit poker chips, but they were ultimately unsuccessful in passing them off. One group repainted real low-value chips to simulate high-value chips. They were caught. Another group had injection-molded replicas made of genuine compression-molded chips. They were caught.

Here's a pretty good thread about the possibility of fake Paulsons.

Here's a thread with some actual examples of fake Paulsons. Note that those look pretty good, but would be spotted as fakes in an instant by anyone who knows what to look for.

Here's some other examples and discussion of fakes.

 

[droppingdeuces]

Yes, thanks.

You do know about RFID in high denomination chips, right?

Yes - black light/UV are pretty basic security features these days.

Get out yer black light! Many chips have fluorescent ink features as well.

 

[droppingdeuces]

Thank you for your thoughtful and informative response! This is great information. Can the physical characteristics of how they are made be used at the casino to verify/authenticate chips? I would imagine they would need some extra equipment to do that?

RFID is the main high-tech security feature these days. You can even find them in low-cost low-end chips.

Interestingly, one of the main security features of high-end poker chips is simply that they're difficult to make! So-called "clay" chips (which are actually made of a mixture of plastic and clay) are made using compression molding. The chips are formed into blanks, then the blanks plus the inlay are placed in a mold inside a heated press. The process looks like this:

View attachment 906842

And here's an example of a mold that the blanks are pressed in:

View attachment 906843

The result is an object that has multiple characteristics that are easy to observe but difficult to reproduce without having access to the same type of equipment and a very close duplicate of the mold. The equipment is expensive to buy or manufacture, and expensive and difficult to operate.

In other words, the chips themselves are hard to counterfeit without a substantial investment - which dramatically reduces the likelihood of successful opportunistic counterfeiting!

What can you look for on a compressed clay poker chip to ensure it's authentic?

• The inlay is inlaid, meaning it is pressed into the surface of the chip during the molding and pressing. It sits flush with the chip's surface. The transition from the inlay to the surrounding chip material is seamless. Only compression molding can accomplish this. Injection-molded chips have decals rather than inlays; they're essentially stickers, and they're adhered to the surface of the chip. It's trivial to spot the difference, and even if someone is extremely careful in cutting and applying the sticker to try and make it fit precisely within the injection-molded chip's recess, if you look closely you'll be able to tell. In fact, you can even tell without looking, just by feeling! Running a finger or fingernail across the face of the chip, you will feel a gap or seam on the stickered chip whereas you'll feel a smooth flat surface on the genuine chip.
  
  
• The inlay is textured. The mold's surface has a texture to it, and it imparts that texture uniformly to both the surface of the chip and the surface of the inlay. The texture has a grain. If anyone were to remove and replace the inlay, it would not have the same texture as the original; the texture on the counterfeit inlay would not match the texture of the surrounding chip, and even if you replaced it with a real inlay from a different chip using the same mold (so that it had the same texture) the grain of the texture would not match either in position or direction.
  
  
• The edge spots have natural variation. When the chip is pressed, the "clay" is squished before being melted together and then cured solid by the heat of the press. That squishiness means that every chip is slightly different, and you can easily see the difference between any two otherwise identical chips by looking at the borders of the colored spots. They'll be ragged, and they'll be unique. Injection-molded chips will be identical because their spots are part of the mold; by looking at any two examples, you'll see that they are exactly the same whereas you'd expect genuine compression-molded chips will show small but easily observed differences.
  
  
• They have distinctive molds. In the example above, the chip's mold is a number of horseheads running around the edge. There are many different edge mold designs, but they all have something in common - they're simple enough to assess visually but complex enough that a counterfeiter would have to invest substantial effort and care in order to reproduce them. Obviously that's possible - people duplicate currency, after all - but it serves as a strong deterrent to casual or opportunistic forgeries.

Taken together, these sorts of features ensure that if a high-end clay poker chip looks real, then it almost certainly is real. And for a long time, this was the only level of assurance that casinos and card rooms had! Clay chips go back a hundred years, and from the very early days the manufacturers touted to their customers that by adding in distinctive features such as the insignia or stamp of the card room - i.e. customizing the chips for each specific customer - the casino could defeat the scourge of "ringers" - chips that were brought in from outside and then passed off as genuine inside. And they did! The security rested upon the difficulty of manufacturing the chips. An object that is so seemingly simple turns out to be expensive to produce - and difficult to duplicate without going through that very same expense!

But casinos are rightly paranoid because counterfeiters are highly motivated and very clever. So over time the manufacturers added things like microdots and holograms and etched serial numbers and eventually RFID. But the very first security feature in the very first chip was simply... being a poker chip! A high-quality artifact with visible characteristics from its method of production.

Good luck with your paper! We'd be interested to read it when it's done, if you feel like sharing.

 

[elfmag]

I knew about RFIDs but honestly never thought about the sheer difficulty it takes to make the chips being security in itself.

 

[dennis63]

Some high-value Paulson Mark Twain chips had a dot with a micro-print image that could only be read with a lenticular lens -- two specific lenses aligned at an exact distance and angle inside a small handheld reader to be able to view the image. Very, very secure. These chips also had UV printing on them. I believe the micro-printing said "PAULSON" in two directions," and the UV was a hat and cane image.)

 

[CrazyEddie]

Thank you for your thoughtful and informative response! This is great information. Can the physical characteristics of how they are made be used at the casino to verify/authenticate chips? I would imagine they would need some extra equipment to do that?

The specific things that I mentioned - the texture and placement of the inlay, the variation of the edge spots, the design of the edge molds, and other such things - don't need any particular equipment in order to verify; those characteristics are easy for a trained observer to spot. Most people wouldn't give it a second thought, but anyone who handles chips on a regular basis and pays attention to them - which includes casino staff as well as us PCF members! - would notice the difference between an authentic chip and something that's been counterfeited, replicated, or tampered with.

That's not to say that someone couldn't make a very good counterfeit that might pass a close inspection. But to make such a counterfeit they'd need the same sort of equipment that the original manufacturer had, and such equipment isn't easy to acquire.

Injection molding is a commodified process nowadays, and for a very modest investment you could fabricate a mold that would produce injection-molded replicas of genuine casino chips. But because of the differences between injection molding and compression molding, the replicas would be easy for the casino staff to spot, even though they might completely fool the average casino tourist.

Compression molding, on the other hand, is a bespoke process. To recreate the chips using the same methods that produced the genuine chips, you'd need to fabricate not just a mold, but an entire press, plus all the ancillary equipment that's used in the clay chip production sequence. For example, you'll need to mix up the "clay" - which is a proprietary and secret blend of plastics, minerals, dyes, and fillers - and you'll need both the materials and equipment to do so, as well as discovering a recipe which will match the colors, textures, and densities of the originals.

This puts creating fake chips that are good enough to fool casino staff out of reach for anything other than a well-financed and dedicated criminal operation. And while people do in fact do this for currency, the difference between fake Benjamins and fake Bellagios is that you can spend the hundred-dollar bills at any retail store anywhere in the world, whereas the hundred-dollar chips are only good at the Bellagio cage. This makes it much harder to get paid off once you've churned out a huge batch of fakes.

 

[CrazyEddie]

Everything I said above holds true only for compression-molded "clay" chips, which are the kind of chips that have been in use at casinos and card rooms since the early twentieth century. But nowadays casinos have many different options for chips, and one common choice is what we've taken to calling "plastic" chips. These are injection-molded rather than compression-molded, and as such the bar for duplicating them is much, much lower.

However, the chip manufacturers have plenty of other tricks up their sleeve to assure their customers that the chips can't be easily counterfeited. To get a sense of what's out there today, take a look at the catalogs from Abbiati, one of the major suppliers of chips and other equipment to casinos, mainly in Europe: https://www.abbiati.com/brochures/

For a plastic chip without security features like RFID, the obstacles to creating counterfeits are a) creating high-fidelity replica molds to produce the injection-molded chip body, and b) creating high-fidelity replica decals to stick onto the chip body after it's been molded. The decals are just printed material, and so suffer from all the same weaknesses that any other printed object does (e.g. dollar bills) and can take advantage of the same sorts of security enhancements (UV inks, holograms, glitter substrates, microdots, etc).