PaddyPower Mistakenly Pays €1m on Hillary Clinton Bets

Donald Trump’s stunning upset of Hillary Clinton in the 2016 Presidential Election shocked more than just political experts.

Irish bookmaker PaddyPower was so sure that Clinton would win that they prematurely paid out €1 million to political bettors. Much to their surprise, Trump garnered the necessary 270 electoral votes to win the race.

This means that recipients of the collective €1 million will have their winnings taken away just as quickly as they received them.

These bettors won’t be the only losers in the matter. PaddyPower will also end up losing massive sums of money because they didn’t adjust their political lines, despite Clinton receiving so much of the action.

PaddyPower spokesperson Féilim Mac An Iomaire told Bloomberg that the bookmaker was almost assured of a Clinton victory, so they were willing to take the risk.

Due to the unbalanced action, PaddyPower lost €4 million on payouts made to Trump bettors.

“We’re in the business of making predictions and decided to put our neck on the line by paying out early on Hillary Clinton, but boy did we get it wrong,” said Mac An Iomaire. “We’ve been well and truly thumped by Trump with his victory leaving us with the biggest political payout in the company’s history and some very, very expensive egg on our faces.”

Some believe that PaddyPower, like many other companies, had political motives behind prematurely paying bettors.

This was one of the dirtiest elections in recent memory, with both candidates doing whatever they could to gain an advantage.

Popular opinion is that the Clinton campaign had connections to the media and other businesses, which speculated on whom the winner would be head of time. Such moves would’ve helped Clinton if the public thought she was going to win.

This has led to the conspiracy theory that PaddyPower’s early payouts could’ve been used to help Hillary garner more votes on election day.

Another potential reason for the early payouts could be that PaddyPower wanted to ensure that they didn’t take a huge loss to Trump bettors.

These are of course just conspiracy theories. But then again, it seems strange to think that an experienced bookmaker would make the foolish move of delivering early payouts before an election is decided.