EXPOSED! Gambler accuses betting firm betPawa of refusing to pay his sh10m jackpot hit prize

A gambler is accusing betting firm-betPawa Uganda of refusing to pay him after allegedly hitting sh10million jackpot.

According to Denis Ojok, a resident of Gulu, in northern Uganda, he staked shs100 on 12^th January 2022 at 9:32am virtually.

All he needed to do was to correctly pick 15 teams and predict the outcomes in terms of scoring and stood a chance of walking away with sh10miilion.

He had to correctly predict how many teams were to score at least one goal in the match and those that would not score a single goal.

“A player must select correctly all the outcomes for all 15 matches to win the Pick15 – Teams to Score Jackpot of 10,000,000UGX,” reads the rules.

Denis avers that he went on to predict 15 matches. He hit 12 matches and 3 were cancelled.

He however argues that betPawa was supposed to pay him his sh10million Jackpot because it was not his fault that the three matches were postponed.

He says all efforts to recover his jackpot prize have proved futile.

“Whenever I inquire from betPawa, they don’t want to explain what exactly went wrong. But some insiders tell me the money was cashed out and eaten by an insider,” Denis alleges.

According to betPawa Jackpot rules, in case of a match postponement/abandonment, they have the right to wait for 24 hours for the match to start/resume.

In case the postponed/abandoned match does not continue in the next 24 hours from initial kick off time, ‘next rule’ applies whereby—any cancelled match will get its outcome from the match listed above it on the ticket.

The scoreline of the game above will be used to settle your prediction for the cancelled match/selection.

Denis says with this rule at play, he was entitled to his sh10million Jackpot because the scoreline of the games above the cancelled ones were all in his favour.

BETPAWA SPEAKS OUT

Following the allegations, Mark Odur, betPawa’s Uganda marketing manager reached out to this publication to clear the air because if it indeed happened that would be a violation of the firm’s customer and gaming policies.

He says after a full investigation it was confirmed that the customer in question is not owed any winnings, due to the rules of jackpot games, as listed on the https://www.betpawa.ug/jackpot/rules.

“Further into the specifics of our jackpot rules it is stated that “any canceled match will get its outcome from the match listed above it on the ticket. The scoreline of the game above will be used to settle your prediction for the canceled match/selection”,” Odur explains.

Odur says in the case of the gambler’s three matches that were canceled, the customer had picked “Two teams” for all three fixtures, but following the rules of jackpot in using the scoreline of the game above which was “One Team”.

This implies, according to Odur, that all three selections were wrong and therefore the customer got 12 selections correct out of 15.

“The 12 hits could also not get him anything because as per jackpot rules, prizes start from 13 selections correct. In fact, we had a total of 46 customers that got 13 and 14 selections correct and got paid promptly,” Odur clarifies. (This article was first published on Monday, March 20, 2023. It has since been updated to include betPawa’s response-Editor)