One Paddy Power customer couldn’t believe her eyes when she saw that she’d landed the £1,097,132 jackpot while playing the Wild Hatter slot game on the firm’s website.
Corinne Durber had even mentally started spending the money, as you would if you found yourself in such an incredible situation.
But there would be a twist in the tale, with Paddy Power claiming that a ‘technical error’ meant that she hadn’t actually landed the jackpot as described… paying out the relatively paltry sum of £20,265 instead.
Unsurprisingly, Durber wasn’t particularly happy with how the whole episode played out, so she’s decided to take the Irish outfit to court in what could be a landmark case for the industry.
Mad as a Hatter
It was way back during the health crisis of 2020 that the Gloucestershire native found herself spinning the reels of Wild Hatter.
After one such spin, she was greeted on screen by a message that told her she had scooped the ‘monster jackpot’.
But when Durber received a little over £20,000, as opposed to the seven-digit payout she was expecting, she made a complaint to Paddy Power’s customer services team.
They told her that a technical error meant that the jackpot message she had seen on screen did not tally with the result that had been recorded on Paddy Power’s central servers.
After Durber threatened to take the matter further, the Irish firm’s representatives pointed her in the direction of their terms and conditions, which legally protect them in cases of so-called technical malfunction.
That was explanation that did not sit well with the winner, and so she has decided to sue PPB Entertainment – the holding company behind Paddy Power – for the money that she believes she’s rightly owed. The case is being heard this week at London’s High Court.
Durber’s lawyer, Mark Baldock, has been arguing that his client should be paid out in full as per the in-game message she saw on screen. But Phillip Hinks, defending for Paddy Power, has bizarrely claimed that such communications are ‘irrelevant wallpaper’.
Hinks has also claimed that the only thing that really matters is a slot game’s random number generator, which determines which symbols appear on the reels with any given spin. These results are immediately sent to Paddy Power’s servers, so that entire chains of spins can be checked in situations exactly like this.
Baldock revealed that Durber had revealed three jackpot symbols on her reels, which is the random trigger for Wild Hatter’s bonus feature.
“According to the game rules, Mrs Durber then had to ‘spin the jackpot wheel to determine which of the offered jackpot tiers will be won,” he argued.
“This is what she did. The jackpot wheel, once spun, showed Mrs Durber that she had won the ‘monster jackpot’, i.e. £1,097,132.71. However, Mrs Durber’s account with the defendant was only credited with the considerably lesser sum of the ‘daily jackpot’.”
After Paddy Power had consulted their records, they confirmed that Durber should have been paid out the daily jackpot only, with the monster jackpot message appearing on screen in error.
The case continues….
Software Glitch
Although the terms and conditions of betting sites and casinos tend to be watertight, legally speaking, that’s not to say that punters can’t have their day in court and win.
Andy Green found himself in a similar predicament to Corinne Durber back in 2018. He won a jackpot of a cool £1.7 million while playing the Frankie Dettori Magic Seven game; fully expecting to ride off into the sunset with his new-found wealth.
However, Betfred – with whom Green was playing the game – refused to pay out, citing a ‘software glitch’ as the reason.
But Green was dissatisfied with what he felt was an attempt to avoid making the payout, and so he sought legal counsel – eventually, three years later, the matter was passed to the High Court.
There, Mrs Justice Foster ruled in Green’s favour, citing a series of irregularities – which allegedly included Betfred offering a £60,000 ‘hush money’ payment to the plaintiff, as well as claiming that the firm did not have just cause to fall back on their ‘inadequate’ terms and conditions.
Afterwards, Green said that ‘I feel like the world has been lifted off my shoulders and I feel so incredibly happy and relieved,’ while his lawyer, Peter Coyle, commented that he wanted the verdict to ‘give hope to others who may be thinking that the big, rich guys always win.’