Ulster Bank

[Tony Baloney]

I heard of one fella who took out ten grand that he didnt have and went to bookies and put it on a black caviar, spain double.

He better hope Spain wins as they'll be looking it back.

Ur right hi, but if Spain do win, he's laughin!! Result

Looks like he's on for a good weekend.

[clarshack]

can/will a bookie refuse to pay out if they learn that 'stolen money' was used to place a bet?

or do they have to pay out no matter whose money was used?

[clarshack]

How would they know?

He 'loaned' it from the bank.

fair enough!

[Onion Bag]

What price was that double?

[Tony Baloney]

What price was that double?

Black Caviar was 6/4 and Spain around 5/6 individually

[Sheedy]

What price was that double?

Black Caviar was 6/4 and Spain around 5/6 individually

black cavair was 1/6. if she had been 6/4 the bookies would have been out of business.

[Tony Baloney]

What price was that double?

Black Caviar was 6/4 and Spain around 5/6 individually

black cavair was 1/6. if she had been 6/4 the bookies would have been out of business.

That is a fair point!

[Minder]

What price was that double?

Black Caviar was 6/4 and Spain around 5/6 individually

Black Caviar was 1/6 not 6/4, quare difference.

[Milltown Row2]

What price was that double?

Black Caviar was 6/4 and Spain around 5/6 individually

Black Caviar was 1/6 not 6/4, quare difference.

Bit of an Urban Myth me thinks about this story

[clarshack]

does anyone else buy that this whole incident is the result of a 'software update'.

arent software updates tested on internal systems first?

seems like this has the hallmarks of a hacking incident but the bank can't/won't admit it?

[thebigfella]

Nope it has all the hallmarks of bad software quality assurance. Someone Fcuked up big time somewhere 

[armaghniac]

If yon boy had put the loot won on the Black Caviar/Spain win on Monaghan -5 in the Monaghan/Down game he might make some real money.

edit: perhaps he wouldn't.

[magpie seanie]

Nope it has all the hallmarks of bad software quality assurance. Someone Fcuked up big time somewhere 

It's a serious fuckup. Gonna cost them a lot of money in the short term and you'd have to wonder how businesses that have been so inconvenienced will react.

[AZOffaly]

I'm struggling to understand how something like this could suddenly manifest itself midweek. I believe they applied some sort of a patch, but as someone above said, this would be fairly basic QA regression. Can we still process payments.

Either they have major major QA issues, or else this is not the real story.

Also, if it was a software patch, they should have some sort of code management policy which would, worst case scenario, allow you to rollback to a prior version, rollback the DBs, and immediately start re-processing the payments. It's not ideal, but it is part of BCP, backup and recovery. That it has taken a week of downtime seems very slow to me.

Typically after a software patch to live, you'd have a series of 'smoke testing' and sanity scenarios that are tested in the maintenance 'outage' and if they failed you back out immediately. Even then, if something manifested itself later you would have a set of options for addressing it, from backing out the code, restoring the database and kicking off from there again, or by having a 'hot fix'. You'd want to be sure the hotfix is right.

Either way, and without being in any way close to the situation other than having a lot of experience in this sort of stuff, if this was really a code issue, then they have poor QA, poor release processes and poor Backup and Recovery processes.

[imtommygunn]

I would agree with that AZ.

I work in software and this is pretty astounding. The QA processes in banks are generally very solid and laborious due to the nature of the game and how much money stands to be lost.

TYhe bit that baffles me is like you say the rollback. Any patch should be able to be rolled back unless it's a major one, and that's a big unless as they should be able to be rolled back too, in which case it should have been tested a hell of a lot better.

I'm sure heads will roll for this and I would expect this will cause big issues with customers leaving.

You do wonder has there been something like a security breach or the like which they are struggling to get on top of. It reminds me of the blackberry outage in that I think it will have bad consequences for the business in general. They can't be that incompetent and unprofessional, can they...