Bookie faces jail after bogus betting payouts netted £76,000

Robert Hill, who ran the Ladbrokes shop in Church Street, Bilston, pocketed 82 bogus payouts in eight months before the fraud was discovered, Wolverhampton Crown Court heard.

The 52-year-old struck after realising the bar code on betting slips from rival bookmakers confused the computer which recorded winnings from fixed odds betting terminals, allowing him to take money without the loss being detected, explained Mr Andrew Wilkins, prosecuting.

Successful punters playing games on the electronic slot machines got receipts with a bar code. These were scanned on a terminal at the counter to show how much had been won and allow this amount to be withdrawn from the till.

If the link between the slot machine and the till broke down staff could override the system and manually make an 'offline' payment of the sum indicated on the receipt, with special permission required if it involved more than £100.

Hill discovered that by scanning the bar code of a betting slip issued by a rival bookmaker he could trigger a computer malfunction that let him override the system and allow him to determine the size of a non-existent win.

The loss was not recorded because the computer saw the transaction as an authorised payment - so the branch manager regularly paid himself fake wins of up to £1,300-a-time when working alone in the shop.

The racket continued from April 15 to December 19 2013 before bosses realised unauthorised offline payments were being made at their Bilston branch using bar codes other than those issued by Ladbrokes. It is unclear what happened to the stolen money.

All receipts from fixed odds betting terminals should have been kept for at least two months but senior management found the paperwork dumped in the bin at the back of the Bilston shop when they arrived to launch an investigation on December 21 2013. The batch had a receipt for every payout except the fake ones.

Investigator Mark Stackhouse made a test transaction at the branch using a betting slip from another company and told the jury: "The bar code confused our system and allowed you to put whatever figure you wanted as the size of the win and pay it out."

Each member of staff had a pin number to indicate who was using the terminal and Hill's was involved with every theft, several of which were filmed by a CCTV camera.

The defendant was taken to a meeting with Ladbrokes security and safety officer Jeanette Cheetham who explained: "He told me 'I am not staying here to be called a thief,' threw the shop keys onto the desk and stormed out. I called the police."

Hill from Hughes Avenue, Bradmore, who had worked for Ladbrokes for 10 years, was arrested at his home on January 10 2014. He denied theft, conceded the money had been taken with manual overrides using his terminal but could give no explanation as to how this might have happened.

The jury took 45 minutes to convict the defendant who was given bail until Tuesday when he is expected to be sentenced by Recorder David Mason QC who warned: "Custody is inevitable in this case. This was a significant breach of trust in which a high value of property was stolen."