BBC News website today...
They say the bookie always wins - but in 1898 a mystery syndicate managed to gammon the establishment and make themselves a tidy sum with an audacious scam.
The Sportsman, a leading racing paper, was contacted by the Trodmore Hunt Club to tell them of the August Bank Holiday meeting at Trodmore Racecourse in Cornwall. All the information generally provided by racecourses - rules, purses, the names of patrons, stewards, sponsors and officials - were provided.
The racecard was a good one, and a man calling himself Mr Martin, from the Trodmore Hunt Club, said he would telegraph the results to the office. The Sportsman printed it.
Bookmakers took bets as usual, and when the results came through punters collected their winnings. The following day, rival newspaper The Sporting Life printed the results after seeing them in The Sportsman.
However, there was a discrepancy in the odds given on one of the winning horses, called Reaper. The Sportsman had it down as 5-1, while Sporting Life had it at 5-2.
The newspapers needed to check which was correct, so tried to contact the racecourse.
At the same time, bookmakers were suffering after having to pay out on Reaper - a horse nobody had heard of. Some of them started to investigate its pedigree.
It emerged that there was no such place as Trodmore, let alone a racecourse. The people behind the hoax had made themselves hundreds of thousands of pounds by betting on non-existent horses, in non-existent races on a non-existent track in a non-existent village.
They were never caught.
