Following a report received from a bar operator, on Wednesday the flying squad of the Ascoli Piceno Police intervened in Castel di Lama and traced three Chinese men who a short time previously had been able to fraudulently remove the entire contents of a video poker machine.

The three men had used a mobile telephone fitted with special software. After placing it on the back of the machine, they had been able to get the machine to pay out winnings continuously until all the coins in the machine had been paid out. In this way they had been able to withdraw about 100 euros before the bar operator, who had become suspicious, made them stop.

During the following investigation it was discovered that for one of the three men the conditions were such as to lead to his expulsion from the country, while the other two were legally resident in Italy. All of them have been charged on bail for theft, while their mobile telephone and its "Bluetooth" have been impounded on the order of the duty magistrate for the purpose of carrying out further investigations into the installed software.

The amount recovered has been given back to the bar operator. With the help of technical specialists, the first findings reported so far indicate that the latest generation of slot machines can be tampered with electronically.

More specifically, this can be done by placing electronic devices on the outside of the machines that are capable of interacting with and altering the machine's software, so that the coin distributors are emptied. In this instance a standard mobile phone with Bluetooth has been used to broadcast the interfering signals into the slot machine.

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