00:00Now, I would like to turn to the other case, United States v. Aiello, the rigged poker game case.
00:08Beginning as early as 2019, the defendants in this case orchestrated a scheme to use wireless cheating technology to run rigged poker games across the United States, including in the Hamptons, Las Vegas, Miami, and Manhattan.
00:28The scheme targeted victims known as, quote, fish, who were often lured to participate in these rigged games by the chance to play alongside former professional athletes who were known as, quote, face cards.
00:46The so-called face cards included the defendant, Chauncey Billups, who at the time of the scheme was a former NBA player and is currently the head coach of the Portland Trailblazers.
01:00And also Damon Jones, a former NBA player and coach.
01:05What the victims, the fish, didn't know is that everybody else at the poker game, from the dealer to the players, including the face cards, were in on the scam.
01:17Once the game was underway, the defendants fleeced the victims out of tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars per game.
01:27The defendants used a variety of very sophisticated cheating technologies, some of which were provided by other defendants in exchange for a share of the profits from the scheme.
01:39For example, they used off-the-shelf shuffling machines that had been secretly altered in order to read the cards in the deck, predict which player at the table had the best poker hand, and relay that information to an off-site operator.
01:57The off-site operator sent the information via cell phone back to a co-conspirator at the table, and that person at the table was known as the quarterback.
02:13The quarterback then signaled secretly the information he had received to others at the table, and together they used that information in order to win their games.
02:27Defendants used other cheating technologies, such as poker chip tray analyzers, which is a poker chip tray that secretly reads cards using a hidden camera, special contact lenses or eyeglasses that could read pre-marked cards, and an x-ray table that could read cards face down.
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