A Swiss casino has been recognized in Las Vegas with an excellence in surveillance award for detecting baccarat scammers.
Swiss Casinos Zurich was honored last week at the World Game Protection Conference for its takedown in 2024 of the scammers known as the Chinese Eleven. It was the largest scam in Switzerland’s casino history and part of the No. 1 scam voted on at the 2025 conference. It involved about $175,000.
The so-called “baccarat cut-card scam” originated in Macau, then proliferated. Many scammers from Asia migrated to other parts of the world to carry it out, including to Zurich.
Csaba Csoma, the surveillance manager at Swiss Casinos, accepted the award and detailed the case to surveillance professionals throughout the U.S. and abroad.
“It was a scam that took place all over the world,” said WGPC founder Willy Allison. “Large organized gangs hit casinos using the cut-card scam. What I thought was fantastic about this case is the way they detected it and apprehended the 11 culprits. They got successful prosecutions, which is hard in dealing with collusion. They worked with a local producer making a documentary of this.”
An English version of the documentary will be released in April.
The group used a tampered cell phone to manipulate the game, a variation of baccarat. The croupier shuffled the cards and a player split the deck, with the cards fanned out slightly, and the corners were filmed. The player left the table to watch the footage and remember the order of the cards, then came back to play.
The casino became suspicious, intensified video surveillance ,and ultimately nabbed the crew.
“We think it’s awesome work all the way around and congratulations to you and your team,” Allison said.
In various iterations over the years, a baccarat player who volunteered to cut the cards had a camera up their sleeve connected to a video storage device. The colluding dealer turned the eight decks 90 degrees to the player. Before inserting the cut card, the player slid it across the top of the cards and scraped his fingernail across the corner of the cards to reveal the indexes of a sequence of cards to the camera up his sleeve. The player left the table after the cut, reviewed the video in a private place, and relayed the sequence to players at the table.