Tabcorp, the biggest gaming operator in Australia likely didn’t bet on one of their own employees divising a craftily clever scam which bagged him and his other half, over half a million Australian dollars. Trevor Raine and his hiphop dance teacher wife Talanoa collected a total of $600,000 across Sydney and Melbourne bookmakers by forging TAB betting slips.
How on earth would bookmakers, who have no doubt seen every trick in the book, fall for such a thing, I hear you ask? Well this fruad was something of an inside job and to be fair was pretty well thought out. Mr Raine worked in the IT department at Tabcorp and was able to call up unclaimed betting slips. He figured out that by forging betting slips that hadn’t been claimed for three months + and copying their serial numbers before printing them off, he could make a healthy profit while his misdeeds went unnoticed.
And for a while that’s precisely what happened. He and his wife claimed $4,000 from 9 bets at various betting outlets. Impressed by the ease of their endeavour however, greed eventually got the better of the pair resulting in them cashing in an almost hilarious number of tickets – 260 to be precise – in just one day totalling $63,000. The couple pulled off the scam over 30 times in total. All wins were under $10,000, the amount at which they have to be reported to government authorities.
The couple had dreams of paying off their debts and mortgage with their magic money tree scheme. Sadly for them it all came to a crashing end when a TAB punter found a misplaced winning ticket several months after placing his bet and went to collect his rightly earned winnings. When it appeared on the system as already claimed, a breadcrumb trail (and CCTV footage!) led direcly to the greedy couple, who will now get to tell cell mates about their betting slip-up for many years to come!