'We've had a touch' - Barney Curley, the yellow phone box and the bets that sank a thousand bookies

There are certain scams and schemes that, while they may have seemed clever at the time, relied for their success on an ingenuity that now looks hopelessly primitive, even comical, like 19th-century bank robbers making their escape on prototype penny farthings.

No doubt the hostile hackers currently relieving big business of millions of pounds will come to be seen as a bunch of chancers taking advantage of corporate naivety, but for the time being they're the cutting edge of tech-driven financial subterfuge. They are, you might say, the Barney Curleys of their time, albeit their shenanigans are illegal while Curley's were mostly just near the knuckle.

The Yellow Sam saga of June 25, 1975 was the height of Curley's punting fame and infamy. It yielded an estimated haul of some £1.5 million in today's money (to be honest, it may have been a lot more) and is widely regarded as the most successful coup in betting history, but before you run away with the idea that this was some shiny, machine-tooled plot, let's delve a little deeper.