News of the World big betfair punter exposed.

fr wishy washy

just 22 and I've made £20m on the horses

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http://www.newsoftheworld.co.uk/news...n-Betfair.html


Article in the News of the World yesterday.


And Betfair's response:
We have been contacted by several customers in relation to an article in Sunday’s News of the World. We would like to make it clear that Betfair was not asked to comment on, or validate any aspect of, the article ahead of publication.

Although we cannot comment on the activities of any specific customer, some facts which may be relevant to some of the claims made in the article include:

the biggest winner in the relevant Britain’s Got Talent market (Susan Boyle winner - Yes/No) won less than £3,000.

No Betfair customer won £1.5 million or anything even vaguely approaching that amount betting on the Champion Hurdle.

No Betfair customer won £500,000 or anything even vaguely approaching that amount laying Monsieur Chevalier at Royal Ascot

The figures shown in the account statement screenshot in the News Of the World do not reconcile to any Betfair account.

The monies present in a Betfair account are obviously no indicator of the sums won or lost on the account.

We would encourage customers to be wary of the claims of anyone purporting to have a profitable system or strategy.

We would encourage customers to retain a healthy degree of scepticism toward any claims made in the press which are not validated by Betfair.


You couldn't make it up:rolleyes:
__________________

Colonel Sanders

I remember this same rag printing an article a few years back about pro footballers laying their own teams to win huge sums on an obscure betting exchange that until then I'd never heard of

The racingpost did some digging and apparently most of the markets on the exchange struggled to muster a few grand in matched bets never mind the sums that the rag was claiming that single accounts had won

Colonel Sanders

link appears to be down now as well

sineadCharl

chancer

Bluetonic

Short story on Betfair system is pure fiction

The News of the World's piece about a punter who made easy money on internet betting exchanges is drivel from top to bottom

There was good news for punters everywhere this weekend – great news in fact, though if you don't take the News of the World, you may have missed it. Nearly 300 years after organised horseracing began in Britain, one punter has the game absolutely cracked. Elliott Short is his name and laying horses on Betfair is his game.

Short, so this weekend's newspaper assured us, is a 22-year-old former trainee City trader who has made £20m in a year, using a system of such deceptive simplicity it is a wonder no one thought of it before. He lays the favourite and one other horse in every race of the day and, since favourites lose more often than they win, he just watches the money roll in. Ker-ching!

Nothing grabs the attention quite like the promise of easy cash and there must have been plenty of new accounts opened at Betfair on the back of Sunday's story. The only problem, of course, is that it was drivel — and dangerous drivel at that — from top to bottom, as anyone with even a faint acquaintance with Betfair could see.

Short's Betfair account, for instance, an alleged screenshot from which was reproduced in the paper, is apparently the only one in history that deals in nice round numbers. We can only speculate as to why the person who doctored it — and the exchange confirmed yesterday that "the figures shown in the account statement screenshot ... do not reconcile to any Betfair account" — decided to ignore the pennies. An obvious possibility, though, is that it just made it easier to get everything to add up.

Betfair is bound by the Data Protection Act and therefore unable to comment on individual accounts. Nonetheless the exchange also addressed several other claims made in the newspaper article yesterday, in a statement on their website's forum.

Short claimed to have made £1.5m when Binocular was narrowly beaten at Cheltenham in March, yet the exchange says that "no Betfair customer won £1.5 million or anything even vaguely approaching that amount" on the Champion Hurdle. Ditto the half a million Short claimed to have taken on Monsieur Chevalier at Royal Ascot.

The most charitable explanation of how this baloney came to end up in a national newspaper is that the journalist in question was having his chain yanked. As the late Rocky Ryan proved so frequently, there are no end of "stories" that fall into the category of too good to check. A tale of £20m won for very little effort will not be the last of those.

But it is a reminder, too, of the complete ignorance that persists in much of the mainstream media when it comes to the business of betting. Something that many followers of racing take for granted, often on a daily basis, is still regarded with a mixture of awe, puzzlement and deep suspicion in the "outside" world.

But, if there is a positive spin to be found in a story that may well have persuaded hundreds of innocents that laying favourites is a certain path to millionaires' row, it is that it just would not have been the same without horses in the middle of it. Racing is still seen as the definitive betting medium and, if someone is going to win £1.5m by gambling, a horse race just feels like the right way to do it. But it is not, and never will be, an easy way, for Elliott Short or anyone else.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/blog/2009/jun/30/greg-wood-betfair-notw-story