A gambler has emerged victorious in a legal dispute against Betika in which he had accused the betting firm of refusing to pay his jackpot winnings.
David Juma, through a legal suit, stated that he accurately predicted the outcome of eight football matches on February 17, 2023, resulting in his entitlement to a Sh500,000 jackpot prize.
But Betika failed to award him the prize, contending that he had correctly predicted only seven out of the eight matches, which, according to their assessment, did not qualify him for the jackpot.
Juma informed the court that he and his brother, Collins Kizito, had placed a wager on Betika’s eight-game Sababisha jackpot on February 18, staking Sh10.
The gambler said that their predictions for all eight matches materialized accurately, and in anticipation of claiming their winnings, they patiently awaited the payout.
But to their astonishment, they accessed the Betika website and found an error suggesting that one of the matches had not been correctly predicted.
They tried contacting the company but their attempts yielded no positive outcome.
“Since then it has been a game of cat and mouse as all attempts to contact Betika to correct the error and pay me my winnings have proved futile. My brother and I have made several phone calls to Betika and tried to reach them through social media but to no avail as there has been no response,” Juma said in his suit papers.
In the matter presented to the Small Claims Court in Nakuru, Juma had filed the lawsuit against Shop and Deliver Limited, the entity operating under the name Betika.
As part of his supporting evidence, he submitted the betting slips and transaction notifications containing the match outcomes alongside his petition.
Juma argued that the actions taken by the company were deliberate and constituted a violation of their contractual agreement.
In his ruling, Resident Magistrate Edward Oboge observed that Juma had proved his case on the balance of probabilities.
Magistrate Oboge ruled that the evidence presented by Juma, which included witness testimonies and a collection of documents, provedd his victory in eight bets. Among these, a solitary bet was contested: the match between FC Juarez and Leon, ultimately won by FC Juarez.
During the cross-examination, the magistrate disclosed that Ken Kagicha, the senior product manager of the company, affirmed that the betting slip lacked any indication of the league division.
“The plaintiff’s lawyer submitted that although the defendant insisted that the bet for the disputed match was for the under-20 division, he didn’t produce any document to prove the claim despite being the custodian of the website,” the court observed.
After conducting a thorough investigation into the matter, the magistrate determined that the teams had indeed competed on February 17, resulting in FC Juarez’s victory. In contrast, the senior teams had participated in matches on February 18.
“After a successful investigation of the facts, I have found that the match between Publa and Cruz Azul was played on the 18th of February, as correctly predicted and that FC Juarez and Leon drew in the Mexican league, therefore, I reject the defendant’s claim that all the matches on which bets were placed were played on the 17th of February,” said the magistrate.
“The court agrees with the complainant that the respondent betrayed his trust by attempting to deny him the jackpot he won and I do not buy the argument that these facts were not known to the respondent,” Oboge ruled.
On top of the Sh500,000 prize award, the court also ordered Betika to pay David Juma the costs of the case and interest from the date the jackpot was due to be paid.
