Dennis Sean McAndrew, who officially changed his name from Dennis Andrew Nikrasch, but also used at least half a dozen aliases during his lifetime, was the mastermind of the biggest slot machine cheating schemes in history. At the time of his death in 2010, he had the dubious distinction of being in the so-called ‘Black Book’, which lists individuals who are forever banned from casinos, in both Nevada and New Jersey.
In the late seventies and early eighties, when slot machines were electro-mechanical, McAndrew and his accomplices used distraction techniques to take impressions of keys used to open slot machines, fashioned new keys and, later, opened the machines and physically rigged the reels to winning jackpot combinations. Collectively, they stole a reported $25 million a year from Las Vegas casinos.
In 1983, McAndew began an eight-year prison sentence after pleading guilty to using a set of magnets and locksmith tools, dubbed the ‘Nikrasch device’, to illegally manipulate slot machines and defraud Las Vegas casinos. Following his release in 1991, McAndrew adopted more sophisticated methods to cope with the evolution of slot machines in the interim. They still involved opening slot machine cabinets but, rather than physically rigging reels, reprogramming Erasable Programmable Read-Only Memory. (EPROM) chips, without removing them from the machine and thereby invalidating security measures.
In 1998, McAndrew was convicted for a second time, for swindling over $6 million from various Las Vegas casinos, including nearly $2 million from the Luxor alone, between September 1996 and November 1997. He had also travelled to Atlantic City, with a view to fraudulently winning a $5 million slot jackpot, only to be foiled when the jackpot was won legimately beforehand. A search of his residence revealed an ‘Aladdin’s Cave’ of slot machines, microchips and other incriminating evidence. McAndrew was sentenced to a further seven-and-a-half years’ imprisonment, of which her served six.