Casino Security: How to Catch and Keep Repeat Offenders Out

It’s a busy Saturday night, and your casino is packed. Patrons are enjoying themselves, and everything runs smoothly. At least that’s what you think. Flash forward to two weeks later, when your team discovers that a bad actor got away with thousands of dollars because they stole tickets. 

What could your casino do differently to prevent crime? Read on to learn which crimes to watch out for and how the right software can enhance your casino security and keep offenders out.

Casino Crimes 

Mitigating crime comes with the territory for casinos—especially because of the large volumes of cash and the size of transactions you handle. Stay on your toes by keeping a watchful eye for the most common crimes. 

Money Laundering

Working in this industry, you know that money laundering is one of the biggest crimes in casinos. Launderers make their dirty money look clean by gambling and exchanging cash for chips, placing offset bets at sports kiosks, committing ticket in ticket out kiosk scams, and more.

Theft and Violence

Theft and violence often go hand in hand and are constant threats to casinos like yours. You know the common culprits: fights breaking out, items being stolen from patrons, and large-scale robberies. You may even face issues with criminals stealing tickets or selling drugs. The bottom line is that you need to be vigilant about a range of possibilities because severe crimes leave you vulnerable to both reputational and financial risks.

Workforce Challenges

If you want to elevate your casino security, you need to have the team in place to help it along. Unfortunately, casinos have workforce challenges just like any other industry, which could dampen your efforts. See if these ring true for you:

Attracting Talent

Hospitality is a demanding industry, making jobs hard to fill. Your employees work odd hours, long shifts, and even weekends. When you think about it, most people don’t want to work from 10 p.m.-6 a.m., which is why so many casino workers transition to new careers.

Burnout and Turnover 

With the talent pool receding and workers leaving for greener pastures, your team has more to get done with fewer staff members. Taking on bigger workloads with limited support is overwhelming for even the most talented employees. In fact, the stress often causes burnout and turnover, making it that much more of a challenge for casino security employees to recognize repeat offenders.

Between challenges in attracting talent and keeping it, casinos like yours have a harder time keeping criminals off their property. Small steps—such as taking self-excluded patrons off the marketing list or maintaining a list of banned patrons—can make a dent, but workforce challenges create a disadvantage where casinos don’t have the people or technology to stop bad actors.

How Casino Facial Recognition Fills in Gaps 

Whether your processes are lagging behind or you’re trying to make up for lost labor, facial recognition strengthens your casino security and surveillance. In fact, with the right tools, your team can be better equipped to identify criminals before they enter. Any combination of these can elevate your venue:

License Plate Recognition (LPR)

Thanks to LPR, it’s easy to capture license plate details when a patron parks. The intelligent cameras and software compare plates to various records, from your casino’s database of offenders to “be on the lookout” alerts from the police. Because LPR integrates with facial recognition, you get full visibility into license plate and vehicle details and can tie these records to patrons’ faces, making it even easier to rapidly identify if vehicles are banned and/or belong to criminals or self-excluded players.

Entryway ID Scanning

No red flags in the parking lot? Entryway ID scanning scans faces and enrolls patrons at the point of entry. If a known criminal didn’t go through the parking garage, you have another layer of protection to prevent them from entering, building records of both the good and the bad. 

eConnect Alerts 

Once patrons hit the gaming floor, you don’t want to miss a beat. Our eConnect Alerts app ensures that necessary parties—from casino security to compliance and VIP services—get access to necessary details. 

Our Android- and iOS-compatible app provides brief, real-time operational alerts based on certain tags immediately or at a threshold of activity. With it. you enable better collaboration between surveillance and casino security to notify parties about banned individuals, self-exclusion violations, cheaters or advantage players, and more.

Get the Power of Facial Recognition

Casinos have always been vulnerable to bad actors, but unlike years past, you have more options to see and intervene. Casino facial recognition technology helps you stop money laundering, theft, and violence and creates records to identify criminals who return. From LPR to ID scanning, you have tools to stop bad actors from entering your property. 

Elevate your casino security with eConnect! Our platform is split into several product suites to meet your specific needs—whether that’s LPR, ID scanning, or a little bit of everything. eConnect is the only facial recognition provider built with casinos in mind, so you never have to worry about whether it can accommodate your use case. We integrate with more major tools than any other solution, too, helping you to keep moving without missing a beat. 

Ready to get started? Book a free demo to see eConnect in action and plan your implementation.