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Muscogee Nation Gaming Enterprises
River Spirit Casino Resort Chooses Oosto OnWatch for Watchlist Alerting
On the banks of the Arkansas River in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the River Spirit Casino Resort is the second largest of nine casinos owned by Muscogee Nation Gaming Enterprises where, on any given day, an enormous amount of money exchanges hands - requiring a comprehensive security framework to protect those who are playing with, handling, transferring, and protecting such large sums.
From a security posture, it is a complex, cross-site operational challenge that needs to follow a simple set of procedures: Deter, detect, notify, and ultimately, defend.
The Challenge
As large, wide-open environments with many entry and exit points, casinos create a particularly difficult landscape to comprehensively secure - it is humanly impossible to monitor everything at all times for a multitude of threats.
Moreover, Muscogee Nation Gaming Enterprises operates multiple properties, so managing the number of people they have to watch while consolidating all relevant information into a centralized location is challenging.
Some of the challenges facing River Spirit Casino included:
- Thefts - Theft and fraud in casinos are rampant. Increasingly sophisticated mechanisms of theft are challenging casino operations teams to get ahead of crime in order to effectively protect guests, staff, and assets. And the River Spirit Casino team was having difficulty recognizing faces of persons of interest (POIs), which included banned patrons, known criminals, and self-excluders amidst the sheer volume of people traversing through the casino’s vast property each day.
- Reputational Risk - In a large resort environment, casinos have a reputation to uphold so they work hard to identify self-excluders, advantage players, and bad actors as soon as possible and ban them in order to preserve their brand and ensure that their guests feel safe and comfortable.
- Compliance - Money laundering threats, ever-changing regulations, and compliance with the Anti-Money Laundering Act of 2020 heighten the necessity of maintaining the integrity of operations.
- Labor shortages - Labor shortages are only adding to the complexity. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, approximately 165,000 openings are projected for security guards and gambling surveillance officers annually, on average, over the next decade.
- Human limitations - River Spirit has a watchlist of close to 1000 individuals. Having security guards memorize the faces of all the people on a watchlist of that size is impractical given the number of patrons streaming into the various entrances at any given time.
- Investigations - Casinos require security technology that has the ability to monitor activities both in real-time and retrospectively – software that incorporates analytics to track behavior patterns and alert teams as an event is happening, and after it’s happened.
Security teams need more help.
“That’s why we looked for an AI solution to actually help us control those faces and say this is the person I’m looking for. Tell me if they’re here or they’re not.” –Travis Thompson, Director of Compliance, Muscogee Nation Gaming Enterprises
Muscogee Nation and its systems integrator, Orion Security Solutions, turned to Oosto to take their casino’s enterprise security systems to a new level and solve their existing challenges.
About River Spirit Casino
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Headquarters:
Tulsa City, Oklahoma
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Industry Sector:
Casinos and Gaming
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# of Employees:
700
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Year Founded:
2009
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Services:
Casino and gaming amenities
Resort destination
Live entertainment
Dining
Spa
Salon services
Recreational activities
Retail
Convention center
Sporting events
Our Solution
OnWatch quickly became an instrumental tool in the successful daily operations of River Spirit Casino.
Oosto’s facial recognition technology indexes every face coming in from seven different entrances from several different angles on 25 different cameras for BOLOs (“be on the lookout”), banned patrons, known criminals, and advantage players. The company’s proprietary module, Centralized Intelligence Dashboard, helps run reports and share information easily across the organization with an easy-to-implement workflow.
The human eye alone is imperfect, and most facial recognition solutions underperform in real-world conditions. Casinos are especially challenging environments because:
The facial recognition system needs to recognize banned patrons when the cameras are positioned high on the walls and ceilings (creating acute camera angles),
People are entering in large groups,
Visitors are not looking directly at the camera, and
They're often wearing face coverings (e.g., masks, glasses, hats, etc.).
The ability to spot bad actors in real-time under these conditions and to do it accurately is a challenging task. That’s why Oosto’s technology is an essential security tool for gaming operations.
“The key is being able to identify people of interest accurately and to do it in a way that is proactive and allows the property to respond in an appropriate manner.” – Sean Crain, President, Orion Security Solutions
Oosto OnWatch quickly and accurately recognizes persons of interest for casino security teams – from VIPs to banned players – to improve the player experience, address compliance risks, and make casinos safer, more enjoyable destinations. Oosto can identify a person of interest and the people they have come in contact with through both face and attribute recognition in real-time or in historical footage, and get an alert instantly on any device.
“Knowing your customer is an extremely difficult task in the casino industry,” says Mr. Thompson. “But this is how we leverage Oosto’s technology to help identify and show that we are doing our due diligence in getting to better know our customers.”
If a crime happens on the property and River Spirit Casino’s team needs to look retrospectively at historical video footage for information on activity leading up to, during, and after the crime, OnWatch can ingest video from multiple sources and quickly analyze the footage to inform teams about the full context of a perpetrator’s actions. With Oosto, River Spirit can expedite investigations by searching through hours of offline video footage for persons of interest in a matter of minutes.
According to Mr. Thompson, “The investigations tool is a critical piece to how we use Oosto - it’s one of the areas I really enjoy the most about it. We can backward search or we can forward search from the point we put in and so we know when people have been on our property and I think that’s extremely helpful to us.”
Oosto OnWatch allows for tracking of POIs and criminals who've committed crimes in other properties, and River Spirit Casino staff are thus able to work with law enforcement to more effectively keep them out.
OnWatch is also leveraging River Spirit Casino’s existing camera (CCTV) infrastructure and VMS system. Thus, Oosto’s solution did not require the purchase of new cameras or even the repositioning of existing cameras to identify individuals on a watchlist in real-time, which differentiates Oosto from other facial recognition providers.
Ultimately, “It ended up being a fantastic solution for us, very effective in the areas we want to be effective,” said Jeff Brooks, Chief Information Officer, Muscogee Nation Gaming Enterprises. “Not overly intrusive to our guests, but also keeping bad actors out of our facilities.”
Oosto’s facial recognition technology indexes every face coming in from seven different entrances from several different angles on 25 different cameras for BOLOs (“be on the lookout”), banned patrons, known criminals, and advantage players. The company’s proprietary module, Centralized Intelligence Dashboard, helps run reports and share information easily across the organization with an easy-to-implement workflow.
The human eye alone is imperfect, and most facial recognition solutions underperform in real-world conditions. Casinos are especially challenging environments because:
The ability to spot bad actors in real-time under these conditions and to do it accurately is a challenging task. That’s why Oosto’s technology is an essential security tool for gaming operations.
“The key is being able to identify people of interest accurately and to do it in a way that is proactive and allows the property to respond in an appropriate manner.” – Sean Crain, President, Orion Security Solutions
Oosto OnWatch quickly and accurately recognizes persons of interest for casino security teams – from VIPs to banned players – to improve the player experience, address compliance risks, and make casinos safer, more enjoyable destinations. Oosto can identify a person of interest and the people they have come in contact with through both face and attribute recognition in real-time or in historical footage, and get an alert instantly on any device.
“Knowing your customer is an extremely difficult task in the casino industry,” says Mr. Thompson. “But this is how we leverage Oosto’s technology to help identify and show that we are doing our due diligence in getting to better know our customers.”
If a crime happens on the property and River Spirit Casino’s team needs to look retrospectively at historical video footage for information on activity leading up to, during, and after the crime, OnWatch can ingest video from multiple sources and quickly analyze the footage to inform teams about the full context of a perpetrator’s actions. With Oosto, River Spirit can expedite investigations by searching through hours of offline video footage for persons of interest in a matter of minutes.
According to Mr. Thompson, “The investigations tool is a critical piece to how we use Oosto - it’s one of the areas I really enjoy the most about it. We can backward search or we can forward search from the point we put in and so we know when people have been on our property and I think that’s extremely helpful to us.”
Oosto OnWatch allows for tracking of POIs and criminals who've committed crimes in other properties, and River Spirit Casino staff are thus able to work with law enforcement to more effectively keep them out.
OnWatch is also leveraging River Spirit Casino’s existing camera (CCTV) infrastructure and VMS system. Thus, Oosto’s solution did not require the purchase of new cameras or even the repositioning of existing cameras to identify individuals on a watchlist in real-time, which differentiates Oosto from other facial recognition providers.
Ultimately, “It ended up being a fantastic solution for us, very effective in the areas we want to be effective,” said Jeff Brooks, Chief Information Officer, Muscogee Nation Gaming Enterprises. “Not overly intrusive to our guests, but also keeping bad actors out of our facilities.”
“Knowing your customer is an extremely difficult task in the casino industry. But this is how we leverage Oosto’s technology to help identify and show that we are doing our due diligence in getting to better know our customers.”
Travis Thompson, Director of Compliance, Muscogee Nation Gaming Enterprises
The Results
Oosto’s facial technology software has helped the River Spirit Casino shape a stronger security posture in the face of daily threats while improving operational efficiency.
With fewer false positives than anyone else in the industry, Oosto’s software is prized for its unparalleled accuracy. That means when OnWatch triggers a detection, River Spirit Casino’s security knows with a high degree of certainty that the person that has been identified is, in fact, the person on the watchlist - leading to far fewer false alarms that allow the security team to take any alerts coming in very seriously.
As a result, River Spirit Casino’s security team sees “anywhere from three to five positive detections per day now that we are actually 100% positive by the process of identifying them and IDing them, “ says Mr. Thompson. “That person is escorted off property or based on their history they could have warrants and our tribal police can arrest them at that time.”
Moreover, says Mr. Thompson, “I've had several outside agencies that we’ve worked with that come back in and say, man I wish we had this and you’re talking about at a government level they don’t have this. We’ve got something they don’t have and we use it in a very ethical and responsible way.”
Oosto’s Vision AI technology is helping gaming organizations like Muscogee Nation Gaming Enterprises stay focused on the fundamentals of strong client service while remaining resilient as the marketplace continues to shift.
As forward-thinking casino companies look to stay competitive, grow revenues, solve business challenges, gain greater operational efficiencies and ensure safer, more secure spaces, they look to Oosto - and then never look back.
3-5 Positive Detections Per Day with Oosto
