Open up the Racing Post, or the racing/sports section of any daily newspaper, and you’ll see listings of tipsters, all promising you the next best thing to bet on if you give them a call or subscribe to them. Worse still, if you have left your mobile phone number with a betting company or betting site it is pretty likely your number could be sold to “interested parties”, and you start getting text messages offering tips. So what is the best approach to so-called “tipsters”?
First of all, you have to ask yourself why they want you to pay for this magical information. If it is so good, can’t they just bet it themselves? Some will attempt to make the information sound better by suggesting they’ve been “barred” from placing bets because of past successes, or make it sound as if they need “trustworthy” people to keep it all secret.
The truth is that getting you to pay for “information” is an easy money-raiser for the “tipster”. These people are just using your cash instead of their own. You will also be wise to avoid any kind of private, unsolicited attempts to get you to pay for tips. They are almost guaranteed to be scams.
This is not to suggest that there aren’t any good tipsters out there. The Racing Post, at under £2.00 per day, is a wealth of easy-to-read information, and it’s free to you if you can read it in a betting shop. The tipsters advertising in the Racing Post all have to prove their tips upfront to the paper before they can advertise, so at least – win or lose – they aren’t trying to scam you.