Two individuals who helped steal $280,000 from sportsbook William Hill’s Nevada and Las Vegas operations have been sentenced to probation and told to pay back $200,000 in restitution.
Shravan Singh and Paige Steiner worked for William Hill, administering their betting kiosks at sportsbooks across Las Vegas. Between late 2021 and mid-2022, the pair were responsible for fraudulently obtaining $280,000 from more than 3,000 transactions. An investigation began into their activities in December 2022, and in January, the pair were fired.
Singh and Steiner, along with two other co-conspirators due in court this week, used their positions of privilege at the bookmaker to manipulate self-serving betting kiosks into giving exaggerated payouts.
The William Hill brand in the U.S. is owned by Las Vegas-based Caesars Entertainment. They finalized the purchase of the British bookmaker’s U.S. business in April 2021 for just shy of $4 billion.
The Embezzlement
The fraudulent scheme was deceptively simple. Singh was a supervisor with access to company-wide systems that operated betting kiosks across Las Vegas.
He recruited Paige Steiner, who worked as a kiosk assistant at William Hill, to help bring in gamblers for his scheme.
Accomplices would put regular amounts into a machine, sometimes placing a bet. Then Singh, or other supervisors under investigation, would be informed. They would find the transaction on the logs and boost the balance of the machine to a few percentage points above what was put in.
Then the accomplice could withdraw more cash than they put in, and give the extra to the betting kiosk employees, like Steiner, that were in on the scheme.
Three employees facing charges this week used this system to embezlle $72,000 over five days before being caught.
Singh got away with it for a longer period because he used smaller cash adjustments spread across more transactions per day, some 3,000 transactions in total. He was also the supervisor responsible for monitoring the system, so naturally he avoided reporting the discrepancies he caused.
“Due to his position, Singh was able to avoid getting caught because he avoided reporting on himself,” said a police report from 2022.
The Charges
The two former gambling business employees were charged with dozens of counts of various crimes related to their scheme.
That included unlawful felony acts with computers, theft, forgery, conspiracy to commit theft, and burglary of a business.
They both filed guilty pleas last year. This week, they received probationary sentences, with the promise of a minimum of three years prison time if they break the court-ordered rules. They also were ordered to pay back $200,000 to Caesars Entertainment.
Singh and Steiner can count themselves lucky, based on possible sentences for similar criminals caught recently.
In Milwaukee, Wisconsin, two city employees are potentially facing 15 years in prison for allegedly embezzling the profits of selling city assets to the tune of $100,000. Only they also then gambled the majority of the stolen money at the local Potawatomi Hotel & Casino. Which is just across the road from the City Works Depot they were employed at.
David is an online casino expert who specializes in online slots and boasts over 10 years experience writing about iGaming. He has written for a wide range of notable publications, including eSports Insider and WordPlay Magazine.
David graduated Derby University with a BA Degree in English Literature and Creative Writing.
