Did Ladbrokes Lose A Batch Of Betting Slips?

Where did Ladbrokes hide their betting slips? That’s the mystery I’m attempting to resolve.

I am missing a couple of slips but Ladbrokes appear to have lost a few more than that.

In the 2019 / 20 season I placed over 20 football ante-post bets in a shop that closed prior to the season ending. It became a battle to collect my winnings. Eventually I arrived at a stage where two bets were outstanding – slips that I acknowledge I mislaid – but due primarily to having to chase around in an attempt to collect my other bets.

Ladbrokes tell me the missing slips cannot be traced, so don’t exist, but I’m not convinced they even retain a copy of them in their system. On the face of it this sounds a ridiculous suggestion but based on what happened over the last few months I regard it as highly plausible.

How do I know that I made the bets? I document and record all my bets. For me to have written down and data input two trades that didn’t exist is virtually unthinkable, but it’s the reaction of Ladbrokes that convinces me.

To collect winnings on my bets I headed off to the nearest still open shop and was told to contact customer services. They then passed me on to customer care and I received a response from my July 3rd email telling me to make a copy of my winning bets and forward them on to customer care. I asked why they were unable to take the slip numbers and track them from those but it seemed that I had to scan all the slips and send them through.

A couple of bets involved teams in the play-offs so I scanned and sent copies of the winners through and waited….. and waited a bit more.

A few phone calls and a month later I was informed that I could return to the shop and collect my winnings. In that month I worked on the basis that Ladbrokes had tracked down all my bets from the archives, settled the winners and informed the shop of the payouts. I would return to the shop with my winning slips that would tie up with the information the shop had been supplied with and get paid out.

Pretty straightforward really. Trouble is, when I got to the shop they had no idea what I was talking about. Frustrating doesn’t start to describe it. From the start I didn’t understand why they needed me to scan and send copies of the bets. Surely providing slip numbers would have been adequate as they could have traced the bets from the numbers but still not paid me until I arrived with the slips. They had me jumping through hoops, then told me they had sorted everything when they hadn’t actually done anything.

In the shop they managed to pay me out on a few of the bets. Paper copies had been transferred from the old shop so they at least had a record of some of them.

It just didn’t make sense. A relatively straight forward process had become complicated and it wasn’t about to get any easier.

Repeat the process. Customer care spent ages supposedly searching for the slips and eventually I got the green light to return to the shop to collect and again the manager knew nothing about these slips that customer care had spent ages verifying.

Fortunately the manager was prepared to go the extra mile in an attempt to resolve the matter and he did so based on what the command chain told him. He could get authorisation from his area manager to pay my slips out, bypassing customer care. I wasn’t going to argue as it seemed to be my best chance of receiving a payout, but what had customer care been up to? Had they ever looked for the slips and, if not, why not? I had to wonder that maybe they didn’t know where to find them.

The manager took copies of my slips, manually settled them and obtained permission from the area manager. I returned to collect the winnings and that looked like a good job done. Trouble was they hadn’t all been settled correctly and I believe that was through no fault of his own. One of the bets was a snooker bet that I’d held for a while

Another option I had been given by customer services even after I had emailed the slips through was to send all my slips to them. I declined that invitation because I explained to them that was like sending money through the post and even if it had been registered it would have been hard to demonstrate how many bets had been sent. It also struck me as unnecessary. Why would I need to do this unless they hadn’t kept a record themselves?

The conclusion I was drawn to was that they no longer held details of the bets from the Harlow shop. Somehow the records had disappeared.

This did not bode well for a couple of my remaining bets. I had to carry all these bets backwards and forwards with me for a couple of months. Unfortunately, during this time, I mislaid a couple of the slips.

I had the slips because I wanted to get them paid together. Fulham were finally promoted on 4th August. At this point as I couldn’t find the slips I notified Ladbrokes to ensure that nobody else could get paid out.

On the 24th September, nearly 2 months after my email informing Ladbrokes of my missing slips I received a response. They told me that they had carried out a thorough check on the archives and could find no details of the slips and wished me all the best for my future betting with Ladbrokes.

I am somewhat cynical about how these bets were searched for. I certainly have the impression that the original scanned copies are no longer available and maybe they searched some binary code.

I know that I placed the bets. Every bet I place is logged on paper and then details are transferred across to a database. These details I can provide but it’s cloak and dagger stuff from Ladbrokes.

It would take a major feat of engineering for me to create a trail like this one. I was placing bets on a regular basis and had no inkling that the shop was about to close. I would have needed to create two bogus bets. Why not just one, for surely two together should be easier to find in Ladbroke’s archives?

What frustrates me is that if the shop hadn’t closed I would have been able to get all my bets paid out at an appropriate time and not had to take my bets back and forth, thus ensuring they were all kept together, thus ensuring that nothing was lost.

All the emails I received from Ladbrokes suggest they want to keep me in the dark. I have been passed on to several different people which muddies the water. One girl was most determined to get to the bottom of it all but when I called to speak to her she was never available any more. About half a dozen calls went unreturned.

A new person was assigned to the dispute and informed me that they had no record of any settled bets fitting the description of mine. I suggested that maybe the bets never got settled as the shop closed and offered up more information regarding the time I would have been in the shop. I never received a response to this. The no response element has been a common theme over the last 9 months.

At the time of writing they are still looking into my query about one of the payouts. This is a payout authorised by the area manager when customer care chose not to take responsibility.

It highlights why they should have done what they said they were going to do and gone to the archives, traced the bets, settled them accordingly and informed the shop of the payouts.

The shop made a payment of £600 based on a 5/1 place for Murphy. I had several bets to collect and didn’t spot the error until I got home and went to reconcile the bets. According to my records he was in at 16/1 so should have paid £900. I looked at the copy of the slip and thought maybe it was 10/1. I’d had a battle of endurance with Ladbrokes and was pleased to have got as far as I had but then looked closer at the slip.

It is 16/1 written on the slip by the cashier – it’s just the top of the 6 hasn’t shown up clearly. The manager in the shop had no support from customer care, read the bet as it looked to him and settled the amount. In his position that was a perfectly reasonable and sensible thing to do, except customer care sold him down the river.

They failed to produce the archive copy of the bet or the records that demonstrate what the actual price was. They even told me they had done it properly before inviting me back to the shop.

All the evidence points to the fact that they didn’t do any of the things they said they had and you’ve got to question why. The only rational explanation for me is that they don’t know where all the bets from the closed shop went, so I continue my pursuit of the missing slips and the extra money they should have paid me for the snooker bet.