Gamblers place great trust in casino employees, much more so when the employee is tasked with such things as checking through any Keno tickets that a player may have bought and is asked to check if any of them are winners.
However, over in Darwin one casino employee decided that he was going to pocket the winnings of one player who had asked him to check through the tickets they had bought, instead of paying them out.
The amount of cash the player had been lucky to win wasn’t insignificant either, for it was a once in a lifetime jackpot many players often dream of worth some $53,353.60.
Michael John Rich Tomas was that casino employee and he enlisted the help of his brother in law to pull off his scam, and gave him the winning ticket and asked his to cash it in, which he then went on to do.
However, it was only due to the alertness of another casino employee who was presented with the winning ticket that the scam came to light, for that employee became suspicious that the ticket they had been presented with to pay out was actually sold by that employee and the person trying to claim the winnings was not the person they had sold it to.
An investigation was launched, and with the aid of CCTV footage it became apparent that Thomas has gone to quite some lengths to take the ticket from the casino after telling the rightful owner it was a losing one.
The upshot if this deception was that both men received jail terms, Tomas the mastermind behind the theft received a 10 month jail sentence and his brother in law received an 8 months sentence.
