Just 22 and made over £20million on the horses

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Maybe he has about 20 accounts so he could possibly could win massive money without it all being in the one account
 
From The Guardian:


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.
 
We hardly need an expert to tell us that the NoTW piece was not only utter toss, but possibly one of the worst pieces of "journalism" ever seen. Never let the truth get in the way of a good story is a nice philosophy, but you need to get a good story first and this was especially woeful.
 
From the NotW site:

LAST Sunday, we published a story claiming sacked City trader Elliott Short, 22, had won £20 million in a year betting on horses.

Short said he had won the money by taking bets from punters at online betting exchange Betfair.

Betfair, while not commenting on individual accounts, say Mr Short's claims were inaccurate and the News of the World was misled.

While the information was published in good faith and efforts were made to verify the story, our journalism fell below the high standards readers are entitled to expect, in particular the failure to check the story more thoroughly with Betfair.

We regret that error and apologise to readers.
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our journalism fell below the high standards readers are entitled to expect
Click to expand...

I disagree, they're being much too hard on themselves. This story was well up to their usual standard.
 
It's a catch-phrase from something or somewhere, Colin. Can't recall where or what, though. Oxymoron - a really, really stupid cow.
 
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