The casino have no legal rights to refuse payouts, even if it
was indeed a malfunction.
In Singapore, there had been cases of Singapore Pools printing
out scratch-it cards and lottery slips with mistakes, resulting in
the gambler winning. Even though it was their mistake, the bet had
been placed, a transaction has been made, and thus the operator is
legally responsible to deliver what they have sold.
Same too for the casino. The woman had inserted her token. the
machine(the casino), has accepted the chip, and that completes the
transaction. The casino is legally responsible to ensure that their
equipment and machines are functioning properly. If it shows that
she won $400k, even when she might have actually only won $50k,
they are still responsible for delivering their promise of a $400k
payout.
If going by their logic, since the machine has malfunctioned,
and therefore making the woman's claims invalid, then it would also
have made all the bets they collected from all the gaming machines
invalid, as malfunction = unfairness, and that means the previous
gamblers could have been cheated off their money by a
malfunctioning machine.
And since all the machines are connected to a system,
malfunctioning of a single machine will also mean that there's
something wrong with all the other machines connected on the
system. And hence, if they refuse to pay the woman, all the
previous gamblers who have played on the machines have the rights
to refunds from MBS.
