SECURITY - SECURITY - SECURITY

There is nothing more important to the profitability of a gaming establishment than to ensure that it is secure against fraudulent attacks from its customers and employees alike. No wonder why the world's top gaming operators have switched to the ultimate secure system: . . .
      X-Mark Tokens and Xeptors

If George Gets A Clean Shave..... Keep Him Out Of Your Slots !!

 Industry Articles On Coin Shaving

The right hand side quarter has had about 0.040" shaved off its diameter in order to trick the machine into ejecting coins from the hopper without counting them. Most casinos have fallen victim to this scheme for emptying the slot's hopper without know it was happening. The change in coin diameter is small enough to escape casual visual detection. Inductive comparison type coin acceptors cannot distinguish such slight coin diameter changes and can be tricked into accepting shaved coins by "slamming" them. Shaved coins go in for credit and come out free.

The best way to stop this is to prevent shaved coins from entering your machines in the first place. IDX Xeptors have advanced diameter detection optics that precisely measures the diameter of each coin, typically to within +/- 0.005". In order to accept the coin, it must fall within a +/- 0.015" window of the average diameter of the sample set of coins used in the training session to learn this coin type. The result is that if George or any other of your tokens gets a shave, IDX Xeptors will cleanly and reliably reject them, thus preventing your profits from being shaved as well.

Get The Lead Out..... Don't Participate In Their Slug-Fest !!

 Industry Articles On Counterfeit Tokens

A fist full of lead slugs is neither a welcome sight for honest customers nor for casino management. In spite of the well known nearly identical inductive alloy signature between common lead and nickel-silver alloy tokens, many casino properties continue to use this alloy (see upper left token) leaving their machines open to garage-shop counterfeiters who produced lead slugs as pictured in the right hand column and found in the hoppers of slot machines throughout the industry.

Since it is impossible to make something perfectly counterfeit proof, the object then is to raise the level of difficulty and expense of counterfeiting high enough to eliminate the vast majority of would-be counterfeiters. Optically encoded X-Mark Tokens minted by Osborne Coinage and state-of-the-art Xeptors produced by IDX jointly offer a number of solutions to the "lead slug problem". Now you do have the tools to put an end to their Slug-Fest!

  1. Security alloys, as depicted by the lower left token, are available form Osborne Coinage with inductive signatures much different from lead. The unusually low melting temperature of lead and the unfortunate match of its inductive signature to common nickel-silver alloy tokens resulted in wide spread counterfeiting. By utilizing these security alloys, the simple garage-shop counterfeiting process of melting lead and pouring it into plaster molds is eliminated. Melting and molding other much higher temperature alloys is a much more difficult task requiring special equipment and materials not commonly available.
  2. Multi-alloy tokens can be minted as shown in the X-Mark Tokens page. This construction complexity and the need to match two alloys substantially increases the difficulty of counterfeiting this type of token. Unlike all of the competitive units sporting quite large inductive sense coils, the IDX Xeptors are purposely designed with a small diameter inductive sense coil and a centered coin path making them the only coin acceptors capable of distinctly reading both the alloy on the edge of the coin and in the center of the coin.
  3. X-Mark tokens have a machine readable optical mark minted into the surface of the token in a circular band near its periphery. The reflective requirements and angular geometry of the X-Mark tokens prevents them from being easily duplicated in a garage-shop by pressing a real X-Mark token into soft metal, pouring lead into crude molds, or by cutting surface grooves with a lathe.
  4. Reject Unwanted Shadow Coins. Figure 1below show a typical upper and lower limit of acceptance about a normal distribution of readings for a group of coins, presumably identical. All readings, however, are not identical because of slight variations in alloy, diameter, or thickness of coins. Due to the thousands of different coins minted in the world (in addition to all of the slugs) there will occasionally be cases when an unwanted coin "shadows" the valid coin as shown in Figure 2. Without further measures, this unwanted shadow coin would often be accepted as the valid coin. The IDX Xeptors have a solution for this problem. You can specifically program in this shadow coin as an "unwanted coin". When a coin falls into a category of both the shadow coin and the valid coin, the Xeptors will compute the sum of errors for the coin's four measured parameters relative to both the shadow coin parameters and the valid coin parameters. The closest one wins. The result is you retain high acceptance of the valid coin and get rejection of the unwanted shadow coin. This works well for imperfect slugs as well as foreign currency or tokens that are nearly, but not quite identical.

Crossplay Headaches? ... It's Like Casinos Are Everywhere !!

  Crossplay Cost & Legal Considerations

Each of the four tokens on the right have the same diameter, the same thickness, and the same alloy. However, they each have a different optical code minted in them that enable IDX Xeptors to distinguish these as four distinct tokens. For example, the lower right token is 1.465" in diameter, 0.10" thick, the alloy is nickel-silver, and the minted X-Mark code is 60-120. An Xeptor programmed for only this coin will reject the other three. Furthermore, it will reject tokens with the following differences:

  1. A change to another of many X-Mark codes.
  2. A change in metal alloy; edge, center, or both.
  3. A change in diameter or thickness.

So, when you use X-Mark encoded tokens and IDX Xeptors you can stop paying for all of that back room sorting activity and forget about being stuck with crossplay tokens from casinos you never heard of. When you are ready to stop the crossplay, we will be ready to help you with encoded tokens.

So... Do You Know Who Programmed It For That Coin?

The X-Key is an electronic security key for use with IDX Xeptors. After a first use of the X-Key with an Xeptor, the Xeptor becomes secured from further programming unless the X-Key is plugged in. The X-Key keeps a record of each Xeptor that it was connected to and the Xeptor keeps a record of the time and date stamp, and personnel ID of the person who enabled the X-Key. The X-Key is enabled and disabled through X-Tracker, a Windows based software utility for managing and tracking X-Key activity. Data from all X-Tracker transactions is stored in an encrypted redundant file system on the PC.