Quote:
Originally Posted by Denny
Remember the Fix 6. The bet was put in after I think it was 4 legs had been completed (maybe it was 5, can't remember).
The point is they singled all the winners up to that point and then used ALL.
That's why he got caught, it was too obvious when they investigated.
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The bet was placed before the first race went off, and it was structured as X/X/X/X/ALL/ALL. The original runners in the first four races were irrelevant. After the fourth leg (at which point the specific ticket details are sent to the host tote), a tote employee went back and altered the first four legs to match the winning horses.
The real reason they finally got caught was a 43-1 longshot that made theirs the only winning ticket. Had the pool been split up among several winners, pretty good chance that they walk away with a couple hundred thousand and no one bothers to look into it any closer.
And the thing people forget is, they
did get away with it for a long time before that Breeder's Cup.
http://abcnews.go.com/Primetime/story?id=132429&page=1
Quote:
Harn thought of a more lucrative way to scam the tracks. They would hit the "Pick Six," a bet which requires picking the winners of six consecutive races. They would test the scheme at Belmont Park, New York's biggest racetrack.
Here's how they did it: Harn would phone in a "pick six" bet using DaSilva's off-track betting account. The winners he chose did not matter.
Following the fourth race, Harn would use his computer access as a programmer at Autotote and, within the span of 20 minutes, exploit a loophole which allowed him to change the bets before the results were recorded.
For the last two races, he did what was known as "betting the wheel," which was to select every horse to win. "So you can't lose," DaSilva adds.
The first pick six bet netted more than $100,000. "They sent me my money and they congratulated me on my style of betting," says DaSilva.
Meanwhile, racing officials were completely unaware of the scams. "It laid under the radar screen," says Bill Nader of the New York Racing Association. "It was a relatively small payoff. It wasn't something that was very noticeable." This, of course, was the beauty of the scam, or so DaSilva and Harn thought.
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The whole article is a pretty interesting read. Apparently before getting into the Pick 6 scams, they were making about $6k a month by finding unclaimed winners on the tote and getting them cashed at the track.
