Instead they simply received their stake money back when Betfair voided the in-running betting due to "an obvious technical fault which allowed a customer to exceed their exposure limit". Friday's statement, described as an apology and explanation to Betfair customers from Stephen Morana Betfair's acting chief executive officer, said that the bet had been placed by an automated betting programme – or "bot" – via the site's Application Programming Interface (API), which is designed specifically to work with betting software. Morana's statement said that the "bot had developed a fault, causing it to try and place a very large number of bets on the exchange. These bets were large in size and mispriced. As [Betfair customers] know, the Betfair system is designed to prevent customers betting unless they have the funds to cover their maximum liability. "In this case the customer had less than £1,000 in their account so none of these bets should have been accepted.