Following a sports tipster can be a great way to invest your money, however, there are an awful lot of dodgy tipsters out there too who are either out to scam you or are frankly just not that good.
Today I am going to go over some of the ways you can spot these dodgy tipsters so you don’t go wasting your hard earned cash following them.
So without further ado let’s get into it.
Results too good to be true
If you’ve looked at the sales pages of a number of tipsters you will have surely come across someone claiming ridiculously good results.
90% strike rates, no losing months, an average of 100pts profit per month.
You’ve heard the saying before and it rings very true here. “If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is”
Don’t take this saying too much to heart though as there are tipster services out there who do actually produce great results.
For that reason I’d like to propose an alteration to the popular saying.
If it sounds too good to be true, investigate further.
You can do so by doing a quick Google search to see if anyone has reviewed this service. This brings me on to my next point.
No Reviews
Dodgy tipsters can often be fly by night con men and won’t stick around long enough for anyone to expose them.
Always check the tipster has been proofed and reviewed by an independent reviewer before subscribing to their service.
If you can’t find a review for a tipster service it generally means that the service is new and therefore the results haven’t been proofed by anyone.
I have recently noticed a lot of new tipsters out there with fairly minimalistic sales pages that don’t have the wild claims of a typical dodgy tipsters.
This is the hardest type of scam to discern because at first sight they appear to be an honest tipster but if you dig a little deeper you’ll find that no one has proofed any of their tips and the results displayed on their website may be completely made up.
There is however a lot of new tipsters out their who have just launched their service and no one has had a chance to review them yet. If this is the case you have a couple of options.
1. If they have some sort of money back guarantee such as the clickbank 60 day money back guarantee then you could sign up to their service and paper trade their selections for a couple of months and if they haven’t preformed that well you can simply claim a refund.
2. You can wait for an independent reviewer (such as myself) to review that tipster. If the tipster is any good they are not going to disappear anytime soon.
If you know of any new tipster services that you’d like to see reviewed then please drop me an email. I am always on the look out for promising new services.
Inside Information
Another classic claim from the dodgy tipster is that they have “inside information.”
Their insider at the stables has just been on the phone to them this morning and they have a tip which is guaranteed to win. This is quite frankly a load of old horseshit.
The lucky people out there with inside information are not stupid enough or crazy enough to give this info away to regular punters over the internet, no matter how much they are charging.
I have never come across a tipster claiming to have inside information who has been any good.
If you see a tipster alluding to this on their sales page, do yourself a favour and keep you wallet and cards in your pocket.
Out of Context Staking
This one often goes hand in hand with the first point on this list where the tipster is claiming results which seem to good to be true.
These over inflated results are often the product of staking which is designed to mislead you into thinking a service is more profitable than it actually is.
A classic example of this is tipsters advising 10 point bets on every selection and then claiming there making 50 points profit every month from there selections.
It’s not as impressive if you made 50 points profit in a month if you had to risk around 1500 points of your money to get that.
Another trick some dodgy tipsters use to exaggerate their actual results is to advise their selections using some sort of progressive staking plan.
If you’re not familiar with these types of staking plans you can read more about them here.
To keep things brief they generally involve increasing your bet size after a loss to recoup some or all of the losses from the previous bet.
I once came across a tipster service who was claiming they were making 30 points profit a month, every month and had never had a losing month.
Naturally I was intrigued so I dug a little further into the results of this service and found that not only was it using a progressive staking plan but it had actually risked 80 points on a single bet to recoup losses from previous losing bets.
Risking 80 points on any one bet just is reckless and stupid.
I then done some calculations to see how the service would perform to 1pt level stakes and found that in the 2 years the service had been around it would have only made 15 points profit to level stakes.
Any tipster who advises their bets to some sort of progressive staking plan with no stop loss in place is setting themselves up for a gigantic loss at some point down the road.
Always check how a tipster will preform to 1 point level stakes before signing up to their service.
Email Promotions
This one is more of a way to spot a dodgy tipster if you have already signed up to their service.
Tipsters will promote a lot of other tipster services via email to you once you sign up with them.
I generally have no problem with this so long as they only recommend products or services which they have actually used and have liked.
If a tipster is dodgy they will regularly promote any old rubbish to try and make more money off of you.
It’s a good idea to see what other people are saying online about the products/services the tipster is recommending.
Recently I’ve noticed a lot of dodgy tipsters promoting various services which have all been binary trading scams.
They promise that all you have to do is deposit your money with their chosen brokerage and they will automatically invest your money which will make you at least a thousand pound every day.
Now that sounds far too good to be true, and indeed it is.
A quick Google search revealed that the service was in fact a scam and people who had been caught out by it had deposited their money at a brokerage and had all their automatic trades lose.
If you come across a tipster who is promoting scams or dubious services stop following this tipster immediately.
Any tipster who has no problem promoting scams is clearly lacking in ethics and not worth your time or money.
Social Media Tipsters
A lot of tipsters who give out free tips on the likes of twitter and facebook are more often than not fairly dodgy.
Their ploy here is to set up multiple social media pages and advise a selection of various tips on each.
At least a few of these pages are likely to have advised a few winners and when that happens the tipster will then try to sell their followers a subscription to their tipping service.
Because these social media tipsters don’t keep any record of their tips on their pages their is no way of knowing whether they are any good or not without paper trading all of their tips for a while.
When you do this you’ll usually find that their selections preform hopelessly less a few lucky winners.
Unless the tipster has an actual website with some proofed results avoid them like the plague.
Tips From Bookies
And last but not least is the tips that you see on bookmakers websites.
Talk about a conflict of interest, eh?
The bookmakers have one goal and that is to move your money from your pockets into theirs. Never forget that.
Horse racing tips promoted on bookmaker websites will not make a profit in the long run.
Unless the bookmaker is offering value in the form of a bonus which you can exploit never follow their advice.
A couple of examples of things the bookmakers are constantly trying to get people to do is bet in play and cash out their bets early.
Betting in play – What better way to get people to bet on dreadful odds by encouraging them to bet in the heat of the moment during a fast paced sporting event.
Cash Out – A great way to get people to settle their bet at a worse value than they would get if they let all of their bets ride.
Summary
By following the advice above you should be able to avoid the dodgy tipsters and avoid getting ripped off.
[…] whether your picking the selections yourself, following a dodgy tipster, or even if you’re following a proven and generally profitable tipster, you’re going to […]