VEGAS MYTHS RE-BUSTED: You’re Allowed to Cash Out a Slot You Didn’t Play

EDITOR’S NOTE: “Vegas Myths Busted” publishes unexampled entries every Monday, with a bonus Flashback Fri edition. Today’s accounting entry inwards our on-going series originally ran on April 7, 2023.


Last week, TikTok creator @ileana.justine posted a picture documenting what she called her favourite cassino game: “Walking around and collecting all of the remaining hard currency people lead on their machines and seeing how practically I canful get.”

After half an 60 minutes of scouring slots for deserted cash-out vouchers, she turned up $7.28. The picture earned her 4 trillion views and a possible time to come indictment.

The practice, called just the ticket mining, isn’t new. In the eld of analog expansion slot machines, it was called atomic number 47 mining, since quarters, non tickets, were the payday. Back then, it could catch you kicked come out and still for good prohibited from casinos, which decided the penalty on a per-case basis.

Nowadays, many jurisdictions that set aside gaming weigh it either a misdemeanour or felony theft, depending on the time value of the vouchers.

So far, @ileana.justine is allay cranking come out TikToks, not permission plates, in prison. But inwards 2004, a CO adult male was reportedly convicted of misdemeanour fraud for using a 76-cent course credit left hand in a one-armed bandit machine by a previous user. A.J. Werling claims he inserted his possess $20 bill, non even realizing the credit entry was already there.

Werling was fined $500 and forced to do 24 hours of community of interests service.

“It’s been a nightmare,” he told KDVR-TV/Denver in 2017. “I’m non a criminal. It’s ridiculous. It’s 76 cents … I stock-still have got to sell with … having to proceed over what transpired for jobs, apartments, anything that requires a desktop check. i experience to disclose wherefore I experience a play theft condemnation on my record.”

An derelict cash-out ticket, or slot voucher, is supposed to follow equanimous by the casino. For 90 days, it remains the prop of the someone who played the simple machine just now before it was printed out. (Image: Sir Walter Scott Roeben/Vital Vegas)

Finders Keepers is Not the Law

It isn’t common inward Nevada, but the say territory attorney has antecedently prosecuted crook cases based on slot fine theft.

One of two statutes applies. NRS 205.0832 prohibits someone who “comes into verify of lost, mislaid, or misdelivered prop of another person” and “appropriates that belongings to his or her possess use, or that of another person, without sane efforts to notify the straight owner.”

NRS 465.070 states that it is wrongful “to claim, collect, or have — or effort to claim, collect, or have — money or anything of time value inwards or from a play spunky … without having made a wager.”

Even if a one-armed bandit fine is deserted inwards a Sagebrush State casino, it stock-still belongs to the somebody who originally set the money in, non to someone who finds it poking out of a slot machine. Casinos are charged with holding an deserted verifier for 90 years if the rightful winner returns to gather up it.

After that, the verifier expires and becomes unclaimed property. According to a jurisprudence passed inwards 2011, the commonwealth full general fund gets 75% of each derelict ticket’s win, equanimous by the NV Gaming Control Board every quarter. The cassino keeps 25% for administrative costs.

In the fiscal year 2022, Silver State players abandoned $22 jillion inward unclaimed tickets.

As for @ileana.justine, she reassured her fans with the following comment: “Nobody needs to worry. I had my lawyer hold back into the legality. It wasn’t illegal in the state I was in.”

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