Paddy Power’s £1M payout should be a salutary lesson for all organisations who use multi-document contracts

In a salutary lesson for companies who fail to ensure all their terms and conditions work holistically together, and a judgment that should be of interest to all those using ‘click wrap’ to incorporate  terms (particularly those that are consumer-facing), the High Court has determined that a consumer is entitled to her £1M ‘Monster Jackpot’ even though what she was shown on screen was the result on an error. 

Why the case should be of wider interest to organisations

The most interesting aspect of this case is not the outcome but why it happened.  In terms of the outcome, the Court was not breaking new law here, but applying well-trodden law on contractual interpretation.  But the reason why PPB (Paddy Power’s Betting and Gaming site) had to pay out £1M is likely to be of interest, not just to organisations selling their goods and services to consumers, but also to non-consumer facing organisations as well.   

A key or even decisive factor here was the failure to give adequate holistic consideration to the various contractual terms which created the ‘web’ of rights and obligations in this case. The contract terms sat in different documents. Not all of those documents cross-referred to each other.  Some were hyperlinked, and others not.  Some of the language between them was inconsistent, and some was contradictory. As the court summarised: “In the current case the evidence showed that, when some companies merged in 2016, there were various terms and conditions in various documents in addition to various game rules which were all amalgamated partly into one larger document, albeit it with other hyperlinked and non hyperlinked Rules and supplier documents as well. The redrafting at that time was clearly not complete or unitary”.

This is by no means an uncommon risk:

• it may be particularly familiar to companies that have undergone mergers; that have acquired all or part of another entity which they then need to integrate into their business; and/or which incorporated some of their product lines or practices into those of another organisation.
• In fact, such ambiguities can occur within companies even where no such restructuring has occurred: a common example being a discrepancy between the company’s standard terms and conditions and the ones printed on the back of their invoice.
• It is quite common for companies to now have ‘non-unitary’ contracts, where not all information is in one document. A recent example is that some companies have terms which hyperlink out to special terms and conditions governing Modern Slavery Act compliance or ESG reporting, rather than these being part of the main body of the contract.

In this case, failure to ensure all parts of a multi-document contract were properly aligned led to an ambiguity in contractual terms that manifested in high profile consequences.

Further details

In October 2020, Ms Durber placed a bet within the ‘Wild Hatter’ game on the website of PPB. In the first stage of the game (a fruit machine) she saw she could proceed to the jackpot round. In the jackpot round (a roulette wheel design) she clicked, the wheel spun, and it landed on the £1M “Monster Jackpot” (see image). 

In the subsequent litigation, PPB sought to argue it was not required to pay out the Monster Jackpot, only a daily jackpot (£20k). This was because whilst the screen might have shown Ms Durber she had won £1M, behind the scenes the system’s game engine, and in particular its “random number generator software” (RNG), had ‘determined’ she had only won the daily jackpot of £20k.  Put another way, PPB said that what Ms Durber was being shown on screen was an ‘error’; the ‘real’ result was the one determined by the RNG. 

Handing down judgment on 5 March 2025, Mr Justice Ritchie disagreed. Ms Durber was entitled to her Monster Jackpot.

Ms Durber won her case due to an inconsistency between PPB’s standard terms and conditions, and the specific rules for this game. The former provided that: “In the event of any inconsistency between these Conditions, the Terms and Conditions or the Rules, unless otherwise stated, to the extent of the inconsistency, the Rules shall prevail, followed by these Conditions and followed thereafter by the Terms and Conditions”.

It is not entirely clear what “the Rules” was intended to mean but, importantly, the Court held that in this case it meant the rules of this particular game, as had been presented to Ms Durber at the point of entry into the game. These rules of the game, although they did not expressly say so in terms, overall conveyed the message that “what you see on screen is what you get”. The court found that is how a reasonable person would have understood them. By contrast, the Terms and Conditions said the opposite: not “what you see is what you get” but instead that: (i) the sole source of truth for determining what the player would receive was as determined by the Random Number Generator within the game engine, and (ii) insofar as there was a ‘systems error’ then PPB had no liability to pay out and had the right to void the bets altogether. 

RANDOM NUMBER GENERATOR: 1: You fully accept and agree that random number generator (“RNG”) software will determine all outcomes of Games on the Games Website. In the event of a discrepancy between the results displayed on your computer and a Game’s records on our server, our records shall be regarded as definitive.

….

ERRORS: 2: In the event of systems or communications errors relating to the generation of any result, bet settlement or any other element of a Game, we will not be liable to you as a result of any such errors and we reserve the right to void all related bets and plays on the Game in question.

Given the conflict between the rules of the game, and the Terms and Conditions, it was necessary to determine which should prevail.  As cited above, the Terms and Conditions provided that “to the extent of the inconsistency, the Rules shall prevail”. Therefore, the terms which prevailed where the rules of the game: you are entitled to what you see on screen. So Ms Durber was entitled to get what she saw: the Monster Jackpot. 

Non-binding comments on why the above Terms failed in any event

Having found Ms Durber had succeeded by the route above, it was not necessary to determine whether the two clauses cited above nevertheless failed either because: (i) they had not properly been incorporated into the contract; or (ii) they were unenforceable as a breach of Section 63 of the Consumer Rights Act (“CRA”).  It was not necessary to decide this because, in either event, the court had found the primacy of the rules of the game provided Ms Durber with her path to victory.  Therefore the judge’s comments on these points are non-binding (so-called ‘obiter’ comments).  They are nevertheless noteworthy for organisations whose T&Cs contain terms which are (or have the potential to be held by a court to be) unusual or onerous terms.

The Court commented that it considered that ‘Random Number Generator’ clause and the ‘Errors’ clause (as quoted above) were both:

1. not incorporated into the contract, because the failed the common law test that unusual or onerous terms must be more explicitly brought to the other parties attention; and 
2. were unenforceable as a breach of S.63 of the CRA.

It might be thought to be surprising that an organisation like Paddy Power would have T&Cs which failed these fundamental legal tests.  However, a key problem here is one of balance:

• On the one hand, for understandable reasons, organisations do not want their potential customers (let alone loyal returning customers) to have to scale a wall of legalese in order to access their goods / services  (or lucrative gambling games). If the wall is too high the customers will go elsewhere. 
• On the other hand, where terms are onerous – such as the ones in this case, which would have had the effect of depriving Ms Durber of £1M which she saw on screen – there is a legal requirement to ensure that reasonably sufficient attempts are made to bring them to the other party’s attention. 

Organisations have devised various means to ensure this test is met. These usually include combinations of features.  The most common one is forcing the customer to click a box which says “I have read these terms and conditions” (or similar) before they can proceed - so called “click wrap” incorporation of terms.  Other measures include forcing the customers to scroll through the terms (with onerous terms in bold and capitalised) to get to the click-box at the bottom and/or drawing a small number of particularly onerous terms to the customers' explicit attention, for example by copying them out next to the tick box. 

This case does not suggest what combination of measures would have been sufficient to ensure these onerous terms were sufficiently explicitly brought to the customers attention, but it is pause for thought that only using ‘click wrap’ may be insufficient where the terms are especially onerous. 

The Court’s comments on why it considered these terms breached the CRA will also be valuable to those who may have such extreme terms lurking in their T&Cs. Of particular note, one of the reasons that the ‘Random Number Generator’ clause breached the CRA it that it purported to make the RNG a single source of truth for the determination of PPBs liability, even if the RNG was in error.  As the court commented, it creates:

“a serious imbalance in the parties’ rights and obligations, so undermines good faith…[and operates as] an conclusive evidence clause which puts the player at an unreasonable disadvantage when seeking to prove that, in accordance with the Rules, the screen display accurately displayed a win and that there was no systems or communication error. It prevents the player from investigating malfunctions of (1) the Defendant’s RNG hardware and software or (2) the hardware or software communicating the outcome to the storage files or (3) the functioning of the storage system.”

In a world where so many goods and services are provided online, it is understandable that organisations are looking to limit or exclude their liabilities for computer errors.  There is a short but interesting few paragraphs of this judgment addressing the software testing that was undertaken when this game was rolled-out; this error was missed and lay undetected within the system for more than a week before the events leading to this claim.  It is hard if not impossible to identify all system errors.  But in the case of consumer contracts in particular, the risk of making these clauses too powerful is that they lose all power because they are found to breach the Consumer Rights Act. 

Durber v PPB Entertainment Ltd [2025] EWHC 498 (KB) (05 March 2025)

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This article was written by Lloyd Nail, a senior associate in our Dispute Resolution Team.  Lloyd is a dispute resolution lawyer specialising in complex systems, decision-making, and risk, often in high-pressure environments, with a particular focus on procurement law (including procurement litigation), health & safety (in particular complex system failures), and transport (including complex systems risks and contract issues).