I'm with MB thats a spin for sure. The best sting on a bookie ever would almost have to be this one:
Of all the stings in the history of Australian racing, this was surely the most ingenious. To understand just how clever, let’s first establish a few key facts:
• Australia has three separate TAB pools – SuperTAB (Vic, ACT, Tas, WA), NSWTAB and UniTAB (Qld, SA & NT).
• UniTAB is the weakest of the three, with the smallest pools in any given race.
• With all TABs, the odds on lowly midweek races fluctuate constantly. Basically, the more money invested on a runner, the shorter its odds.
Instead of offering their own odds, many licensed bookmakers offer punters the exact equivalent of the final odds from either, or all, of the three TABs. But money invested with bookies in this way doesn’t go into the TAB pools. So the odds aren’t affected, no matter how big the bet.
Now for the really clever bit. Mindful that Adelaide bookie Curly Seal would pay the equivalent of TAB odds regardless of how much they bet, Hayson and his pals set about manipulating the odds of UniTAB – the weakest TAB – to their advantage. Surprisingly, this wasn’t hard to do. They settled on a greyhound race on the Gold Coast on December 20, 2005. In such races, the UniTAB pool is usually just a few thousand dollars.
The favourite in the race was a stayer called Lucy’s Light, which had just five rivals to contend with, and was paying as little as $1.04 for each $1 invested.
Seconds before the jump, the punters placed $16,000 on each of the other five dogs. Their odds all shortened dramatically, while Lucy’s Light drifted out to $13. Meanwhile, the syndicate invested more than $60,000 with bookmakers on Lucy’s Light, which duly streaked away from the field to win easily, despite a sluggish jump.
How much they won:
A perfectly legitimate profit in the vicinity of $700,000, courtesy of more than $60,000 invested at odds of $13, minus the $80,000 they “deliberately lost†in manipulating the odds.
The aftermath: Unsure of the scheme’s legality, Curly Seal took nearly two years to pay his debts. He eventually settled out of court