Fruit Machine Scams
If you are a fruit machine player then you will probably find the subject of fruit machine scams very interesting as it really can open your eyes to some amazing ways your fellow players have ripped of fruit machines.
In our fruit machine scams section of the website you will find below a round up and brief description of each of the more commonly known ways people have ripped off and scammed fruit machines in the UK, this information is purely for information purposes as to scam any fruit machine is of course against the law.
Wiring/Strimming - The wiring or strimming of a fruit machine was one of the easiest things in the world to do. You simply had to insert into the mechanical coin slot on a fruit machine a piece of nylon wire (as found on garden strimmers - hence the name strimming). As long as you fed the wire in correctly and it had a small hook bent into the end of the wire you could soon get the wire to hit the coin register micro-switch and by pulling the wire in and out quickly you could soon register hundreds of free credits.
Watering One way fruit machine manufacturers got around the above fruit machine scam was to introduce electronic coin mechanisms which became impossible to wire/strim as they would measure the thickness, diameter and material of any coin that was inserted into it. This made the scamming of coin mechanisms very hard. But it didn't take fruit machine scam artists long to realise the by simply pouring a small amount of liquid (water/beer/coca cola) into the coin mechanism this would short circuit the coin mechanism and would cause it to give away unlimited free credits!
Rodding Original fruit machines would have several tubes in the back of them, this was how the coins would get paid out of the fruit machine when a player won. What would happen is that the fruit machine would instruct the payout solenoid found at the base of each coin tube to pulse x number of times to give the players their win. For example if the coin tube held 50p's and the player won £1.50 then the solenoid would pulse three times giving the player three 50p coins.
What fruit machine scammers would do is to simply drill a small hold in the side of the wooden fruit machine cabinet and insert a small metal rod into this hold, and then manually make the solenoid move backwards and forwards and thus payout a coin for each inward/outward movement they made. In no time at all (often less than a minute) a fruit machine could be emptied of its entire float!
Off/On fruit machine scam One quite up to date fruit machine scam is known as the off/on scam. The scammer would simply play the slot machine as normal but try and amass as much money into the credit/bank meter as possible, and then when he had won let's say £50 he would simply turn the fruit machine off then on again.
What this would do is cancel out the fruit machines short term memory and the fruit machine would "forget" it had paid out £50 and would then repeat the winning sequence, by turning the fruit machine off then on again the player wouldn't lose the money in the bank as this is stormed in a separate memory of the fruit machine.
This scam means a savvy fruit machine scammer can earn huge amounts of money over a short period of time and without the need of having any tools, simply access to the plug socket is enough!