RFID can't stop me! That's what Richard Marcus, a casino cheater says.

Keep in mind that even though I called him a cheater, it is not defamation. Marcus is widely regarded as the "world's foremost authority on cheating." I guess if you are good at it, you consider it a badge of honor.

He greets RFID and other technologies at the casino gambling table with skepticism, even a bit of derision. In a story in Silicon.com he is quoted as saying:

"Almost everybody gets caught," said Marcus, who has never been convicted of any crimes against casinos. "But it's not because of the technology. Casino cheats are desperate people and they do stupid things. Most people get caught because they get too much exposure."

"I don't have to go back into a casino to know my moves will still work," said Marcus, whose stock trick relied upon slight of hand -- switching in high denomination chips in place of lower value chips on the layout following a winning bet. At his peak his team were replacing three black $100 chips with two brown $5,000 dollar chips beneath a single black chip in a technique know as pastposting. So $300 liabilities were reaping payouts of $10,100.

Such a technique could theoretically be spotted by the use of RFID technology or optical readers but Marcus said it's unlikely that will ever be the case.

The same he says is true of improved surveillance techniques and advanced facial recognition which Marcus claims is easily foxed. "Facial recognition is an absolute zero. There's not one person alive who's ever been caught by facial recognition," he told silicon.com.

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However, one casino -- the new Wynn resort -- has already put RFID technology in all its casino chips but Marcus believes this will do little more than improve management of chips within the cage as it will be too fraught with difficulty to use it effectively at the tables, citing other systems which have come and gone and proved more trouble than they're worth.

"Let's say they do eventually get this stuff working on the table, a really good cheating team is going to come up with some way to screw around with the chips and the signal," said Marcus.

The version described by Marcus is a long way from the TV show "Las Vegas," which routinely features facial recognition ID-ing bad guys in one minute flat at the ficticious Montecito Casino. The show also featured an episode involving a scammer with an RFID-chip in his arm. Come to think of it, the bad guys were caught in that episode, too. In fact, I think they're caught in every episode -- it's kind of the point of the show.

Photo credit: NBC.com from the TV show Las Vegas.