Claw machines have a pretty insane lure to them. After all for a dollar, you could potentially fish yourself something worth much more than that, or at the very least fish out something that would have cost you more had you been lazy and bought it at the store. However chances of you being successful with the claw machine are slim.
If you’ve always thought that maybe they were rigged, you are right. The folks at Vox have posted a video a couple of months ago which proves that claw machines are rigged, and they have also uncovered the various ways in which they can be rigged. Heck, some of the methods these days are so hi-tech that its operators can even control it via their smartphones!
For example in an operating manual for one of the machines, it talks about how the machines can be programmed to have a strong grip for a fraction of the time you’re playing it, which might explain why you keep dropping your prize. Another method describes how the machine’s owners can input the value of the coin, the value of the prize, and the profit they want to make, so basically the machine will keep dropping the prize until enough money has been put into the machine to make it profitable.
That being said, we suppose it makes sense that in the 1950s the Federal Government has actually classified claw machines as gambling machines because you really are taking a gamble!
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