I was catching up with a gaming friend I had not talked to in awhile. He was telling me about his new job servicing gas station slots in Virginia.
So Virginia only as these gas station slots.(technically considered skill games) since to hit a win on the spin you would have to swipe the final number on the real in the direction of your desired number. these are heavily taxed by the state. otherwise relatively unregulated .
So from what he said. The machines are programed to not let jackpots or other smaller wins hit unless a certain predetermined amount of play has gone through them. Similar to a claw machine where the claw is limp until enough money has gone in.
So the big jackpots advertised will never hit unless the specific machine has collected enough to cover it.
Here is where the rigging comes into play. On Machines with an internal components labeled 'fusion'. A large portion of machines. He described a process where he goes into the programming resets the values to 0 for jackpots. Making the jackpot counters reset. He does this on every machine that he services. I got the impression this is standard practice for his company.
In effect he is reseting these internal hidden progressive counters so large jackpots hardly ever hit. Regardless of how close they were to hitting the threshold.
He said It wasn't considered illegal. in Virginia's grey market.
Just thought this was scammy AF for these operators and wanted to share here.