‘Technical glitch’ blamed for betfair lay gaffe
The betting exchange eventually voided all in-running bets on the race after one customer, who Betfair have also confirmed was UK-based, laid easy winner Voler La Vedette for £21,474,836 at 29 (28-1).
This would have left the customer with a maximum liability of close to £600million.
A statement from interim Betfair CEO Stephen Morana read: “This bet was placed by one of our UK customers trading the race via our API or Application Programming Interface (http://bdp.betfair.com/) using an automated program (a ”bot“).
“Their bot had developed a fault causing it to try and place a very large number of bets on the Exchange.
“These bets were large in size and mispriced.
“As you know, the Betfair system is designed to prevent customers betting unless they have the funds to cover their maximum liability.
“In this case, the customer had less than £1,000 in their account so none of these bets should have been accepted.
“However, due to a technical glitch within the core exchange database, one of the bets evaded the prevention system and was shown on the site.
“This was an issue that was triggered because of a unique sequence of events that had never happened before.
“The race continued and Voler La Vedette won. £822,614 of backers’ stakes were matched of the customer’s bet, resulting in a potential liability to the customer of £23m.”
