British gambling giant Betfred told to pay stiffed winner £1.7m jackpot after claiming 'software problem'
- Reference: 1617865032
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2021/04/08/betfred_uk_payout/
- Source link:
In a statement emailed to The Register , a Betfred spokesperson said, "Mr Green won the jackpot three times whilst playing a game provided by one of our third party suppliers. The supplier reported a software problem to us and advised that we should withhold payment."
[1]
"However, we will abide by the court's decision and not appeal. We would like to apologize to Mr Green for the delay in receiving his money."
Betfred's spokesperson declined to elaborate on whether this purported payment multiplication error has since been addressed in the app.
[2]
The case started in January 2018 when Andrew Green, 54, a resident of the small British village of Washingborough, won the jackpot playing Frankie Dettori’s Magic Seven, a blackjack app. But Betfred refused to honor the payout, claiming that there had been a software error. Instead, the company proposed to pay Green £60,000, provided he signed a non-disclosure agreement and promised not to make a fuss.
Green refused and in April 2019, he filed a claim against Betfred's parent company, Gibraltar-based Petfred, for £2m – to cover interest on his withheld winnings – with the High Court in London. On Wednesday, the court agreed.
"Along with my family, I have been through some very low times and become very down," Green [3]told the BBC.
"My physical health has also suffered badly, and I sometimes wished I'd never won this money, because it was just making my life a misery. But today, I feel like the world has been lifted off my shoulders and I feel so incredibly happy and relieved - for me, my family and my legal team. The champagne can finally come off ice and be savoured."
The High Court found that Betfred must meet its contractual obligations and that the company's terms and conditions, said to be 49 pages long, were insufficient to dissolve that commitment.
High Court judge Mrs Justice Foster dismissed the company's legalese, saying it was "inadequate," and "not transparent or fair and Betfred were not entitled to rely upon them."
[4]
Frankie Dettori’s Magic Seven is made by Playtech, a gambling technology company based on the Isle of Man that was not involved in the litigation. ®
Get our [5]Tech Resources
[1] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2YG7USwR5C@o5nrSgaFaT1AAAAIY&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[2] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33YG7USwR5C@o5nrSgaFaT1AAAAIY&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[3] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-lincolnshire-56663830
[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44YG7USwR5C@o5nrSgaFaT1AAAAIY&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[5] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
The article says he actually sued for £2m to cover interest and other charges. It seems from the first sentence (but not completely clear) the high court only awarded the £1.7m winnings.
Nice bit of unintentional free advertising (yes I know I'm stretching it a bit) for another gambling company as well, namely Mr Green .
"and my legal team" who won £?
"and my legal team" who won £?
Who always win £
I feel an upcoming episode of "Who? Me?"
...I was working for this software firm that made blackjack apps for betfred...
Works Both Ways
If there was a software error with the game, did they try to refund the losers, while trying to withold the winnings?
Or was it a mysterious bug that only affected a big win?
Re: Works Both Ways
"Or was it a mysterious bug that only affected a big win?"
The BBC reports:
[1]https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-lincolnshire-56663830
"Betfred had argued that the software glitch, which stopped the game from resetting properly while Mr Green was playing,was covered under the terms and conditions of the game.
...
A Betfred spokesperson said: "Mr Green won the jackpot three times whilst playing a game provided by one of our third-party suppliers. "
Looks like they did not test the post jackpot win reset thoroughly
[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-lincolnshire-56663830
Re: Works Both Ways
my last post - probably better to have stated
"Looks like they did not test the post jackpot win [game] reset thoroughly
Re: Works Both Ways
One aspect I come across is the the notion of "testing will catch the bugs"
IMHO, software should be written with the assumption that the testing will not catch all bugs, and therefore it is the responsibility of the designers and developers to use whatever means they have at their disposal to produce software that works as intended and is "free of unintended behaviour".
The analogy is the trapeze artiste who displays without a safety net - they work on their craft to iron out the "defects" so their "product" is "defect free".
I'm not advocating software development without testing - but it should be the safety net to good software development. Otherwise, just like the strongest link in a chain is the strength of the weakest link, the software will be dependent upon what bugs the test suite manages to uncover. Too many times have I come across test suites with glaring omissions - usually caused by testers conferring and relying too much on input from designers and developers!
And lastly, "Remember, remember Knight Capital "
[1]https://www.henricodolfing.com/2019/06/project-failure-case-study-knight-capital.html
[1] https://www.henricodolfing.com/2019/06/project-failure-case-study-knight-capital.html
Re: Works Both Ways
Surely a simpler solution.
While the test suite is being run, the software developer sits on a chair above a tank of hungry pirhanas. If the software passes the test, then the ligths go green and a small happy fanfare is played. If the software fails the test, then a trapdoor opens - and the Bond theme plays over the speakers to partially drown out the screams...
Re: Works Both Ways
There's no reason to think there would be any wrong-losers. The jackpot was triggering too often, but the rest of the game was working, apparently.
It's an odd case because it is not disputed that there was a glitch which caused 3 jackpots when none should have happened. Usually there wouldn't be a problem, the T&Cs would clearly state that the bookie retained the right to cancel glitches. This case seems to have been solely about whether there was a mistake in the TandCs.
Re: Works Both Ways
Some better reporting would have been useful: it sounds like this case was really about the T's and C's.
Is the court saying that long, hard to read T's and C's are not acceptable?
Or was it specifically about T's and C's which attempted to provide immunity for payouts caused by software bugs?
Or something else about them?
Slowly, far too slowly. is a responsibililty creeping up on the mainstream software industry to produce functional and error free products. It's only going to be with more legal precendents being set - and awards that have any significance - that attitudes will change and the "MVP" approach may start to wither and finally be consigned to the grave it doesn't even deserve.
Minimal Viable Product
I've been converted to the MVP approach after a managing a couple of Agile of Projects over the past few years, As a PM it just brings forward the inevitable cropping of unnecessarily features which occurs on most projects as go live approaches and development is not complete.
What this does demonstrate is how important to get the MVP definition right at the beginning.
I would expect the game initialization and reset functionality to be developed in the first few sprints, not tacked on at the end. There's also no indication that this product was developed using an agile methodology.
Re: Minimal Viable Product
>>> unnecessarily features
Like testing and documentation?
Used to be minimum non-viable product
Regrettably the software industry learned decades ago that the vast majority of customers did not know how to feel the quality, would pay for any old shit and blame themselves for using it wrong when it did not work then buy an upgrade for twice the price (that did not fix any bugs) from the same supplier because it was what the staff knew how to use.
The number of customers with a clue has been slowly increasing (outside government) resulting in occasional improvements in average software quality.
I suppose rigorous testing was dismissed as an unnecessary expense.
I highly doubt there was a "glitch". They probably just didn't want to pay the winnings and then tried to rely on opaque T&C's as a get-out clause.
Denise Coates from Bet365 doesn't manage to pay herself £400m in dividends or so every year because she has the best interests of the gamblers at heart.
" I highly doubt there was a "glitch". They probably just didn't want to pay the winnings and then tried to rely on opaque T&C's as a get-out clause. "
Exactly this. The house always wins.
It's like when you set up an accumulator, and while it's totting itself up it'll give you your estimated winnings. Once I did it and the estimated winnings were over £3,000,000. Would be nice if it came in!
Except, if it did, the bookies wouldn't pay out on the £3,000,000. They'd pay a maximum of £1,000,000. But they have never (not across the multiple apps I've used) ever capped it when they could and arguably should do that.
In the end, I won £700 from that accumulator.
Nutbar conspiracy theories. Get a grip. The things you say are proven wrong by this very case!
That's a lot of tax havens. Presumably the gambling companies are never mentioned when naming and shaming tax avoiders.
Follow the money donations to political entities.
If BetFred have a valid legal case ...
... it is against their third party supplier. If they haven't got a case against them, that's their own legal department's fault.
Re: If BetFred have a valid legal case ...
Well I'm sure they've got some sort of software bug clause in their Ts&Cs. So that if something goes drastically wrong they don't have to pay out. Which may be usable in some cases and not in others, or may have been badly drafted - or struck down by the court, the article doesn't really say.
Remember that Pepsi competition from twenty years ago where they seem to have mixed up the win a free can of Pepsi with the star prize of £50,000. So thousands of people won the £50k and they had to withdraw the competition.
So it might be with a major bug that's going to take down the company, the courts would let them off - but in the case of one specific winner it's deemed unfair that their Ts&Cs let them get away with it.
Particularly if the Ts&Cs aren't reciprocal. It's one of the tenets of modern comsumer contract law thatthings should be fair, so if the company is protected from bugs, then so should the consumer be. So that might be another reason invalidate them.
"not transparent or fair"
Ouch. There are a million websites out there that need to review their Ts&Cs in that case.
First time I've ever heard of a judge knocking down those carefully constructed piles of legal Get Out Of Jail Free (for the company) mumbo-jumbo. If this becomes a precedent, a lot of companies are going to feel the pain.
Sometimes British judges are just the best.
1.7 million pounds amounts to no more than advertising costs. Cheapskates. They should pay legal costs, damages, and interest too.