When things sound too perfect to be true, they are most likely a fraud! This statement can be applied to any kind of offer, sale or advice in any field of business. There are no shortcuts and if you manage to spot one, you better watch out. This article is about paid tips scams, we however have a solution for those of you to whom is bookmaker refusing to pay the win.
Do you recall seeing any Facebook, Twitter or any other social media ads selling sports betting tips or related services? We at Rowdie took our time and analyzed if there were any scams involved. While most of the advertisers were a real business with the living community, we also found some dodgy ones.
Every time some of the sports betting related ads appeared on Facebook, we deep-checked the business.
We analysed the following features:
- Community and reviews
- Prediction models
- Transparency of the website
Community
I get really irritated when I see the scams being promoted on social media – mainly Facebook. I keep seeing the ads for months and that usually means the scammers are making money. Let’s have a look at what the ad looks like.
The most common promotion for many sportsbook related services looks like the one below. This concrete ad belongs to an individual with many scam related features, but it is common also with the ones playing fair (most likely).
From the first sight it is impossible to tell if the offer is or is not a scam, so we dig deeper.
Underneath each Facebook ad you have Comments and Discussion. In discussion you can get strong clues about a possible scam. Let’s look at what this business is showing.
The extremely positive feedback in an area run by cruel probability is simply nonsense. Even Greta Thunberg who is trying to save the world has an army of haters. I have never seen any casino or bookmaker with 100% extremely positive review.
Let’s dig even deeper. I checked the accounts of most of the commenting persons. The accounts were seemingly allocated mostly to Germany, Hungary or the Netherlands. There was the same pattern on all of the accounts presented in the following example.
Just like the profile of Peter Köhler, also the other accounts had details such as profile pictures, names, place of study, recent employer and some activity with a status update and so on. The only signal of scam is in this case the list of friends.
Scrolling through the list of friends of all of the commenting accounts we did not find any of them being mutual friends – making the scheme hard to reveal for Facebook. What we however found was a scheme of another fake accounts being in the friends list. The strong hint is that people living in Europe have mostly European friends. All of the analysed accounts of the white Germans had only or mostly only black African friends. As we analysed the other accounts, we find the last activities were done sometimes in 2018 or early 2019. Interestingly we also found real people accounts in the scheme. My theory is that randomly sent friend requests are sometimes accepted.
We don’t need to give bullet-proof evidence for that. As we checked on Freelancer.com, the price for 1000 fake account followers went from 6 USD, depending on the quality. This means that fake Facebook accounts are a real commodity.
Can we blame Facebook for this? I believe we can’t, to be honest. The fake accounts are sophisticated, maintaining activity and most of them can be revealed only after deep manual check.
Prediction models
How is it you are so successful? This should be a question to ask before you pay for the service. You must receive a satisfying answer to that! But the scammers are prepared for that, so don’t buy everything they reply.
- Is it because you are still an active player and can influence the results? (You can bet that this is a lie)
- Do you have a crystal ball? (Fair enough, but think twice if you go for that)
- Are you a math expert or do you have third party predictions? (This should be a correct answer)
To sell sports betting tips, you have to have a sports betting prediction model. Just a claim about you having reliable sports betting tips is not enough. Easier said than done since:
But even having a prediction model is not a guarantee to profit. All the transparent pages with most likely fair business had information that there was no guarantee.
Selling information about fixed matches is a next level of scam
Every time you see offers about fixed match sale, you should ask yourself the following question: “If anybody has an insider information about a fixed match, why would he sell it for peanuts instead of making a fortune on that by betting”. The short answer is that they don’t have any insider information. The scenario of their way of earnings is most likely the following (can have different variations).
They convince 100 punters to buy the information about the “next fixed match” and sell it for lets say 50 each. Picking a 2 way market they will tell 50% of the punters to place a bet on a 1 and the other half on a 2. After the first round you have 50% gone but the remaining 50% have earned money and will be eager to buy another tip. This time it will be more expensive. With this strategy the scheme can be pushed to the next rounds. With each the fixed match information will be more and more expensive.
Coming back to the scammers. The website only showed pictures of past success results, which are easily done in any graphical software. Strategy was described in a strange way with a focus to sound educated. After deeper check it made no sense.
Transparency of the website
Who are the people behind the business? Where is the company ID or VAT number? What is their email? It is quite suspicious if you only find a contact form. Usually people are proud to present the successful product.
Very good hint to a possible scam is also a redirect of the website, regular site migration and privacy url setting. Make sure to check the reviews of the business. And indeed reviews. We checked the reviews at Trustpilot and can confirm a bad experience of many punters. Be careful! This company has many other websites following the same pattern.
