Sports handicappers are no longer limited to late-night infomercials and flyers stapled to telephone poles. Nowadays, they use social media as an effective marketing tool. Instagram is a popular platform for sports handicappers to reach potential customers.
When you’re looking for sports handicapping service to help boost your bankroll, you’ll want to be sure that the company is legitimate. That’s where we come in.
Here are some ways to spot a scamdicapper based on the patterns and common character traits of their social media accounts.
1. The Focus of their Account is the Experience of Living a Lavish Lifestyle.
Suppose the most important features of a sports handicapper’s social media presence are large sums of money and abundant displays of conspicuous consumption (e.g., cars, jewelry, alcohol). In that case, he likely spends his days not handicapping games but rather promoting himself.
It is probable that the person in question is a scammer and has not achieved success in long-term handicapping. No successful sports handicapper would let their money being thrown around in a show of power or status.
While most scamdicappers are more than happy to boast about their betting prowess and the size of their bankrolls, others who are more legit are more reserved and choose to remain under the radar. To avoid any unnecessary eyes on them from sites or sportsbooks.
A legitimate handicapper’s success depends on the amount of work he has done to research and analyze games and betting lines. In addition, he knows that everyone goes through losing moments and that being humble is a necessary component of being successful. In other words, he has the exact opposite mentality to braggadocious scamdicappers.
2. The Lack of Verifiable and Available Win/Loss Records
If you find a handicapping service that doesn’t make their lifetime win/loss record public, you may want to consider looking elsewhere. As we have mentioned in our article on the differences between how handicappers and scamdicappers promote their work on Instagram, handicappers with nothing to hide will be quick to promote their lifetime wins/losses – for the apparent reason that they can use this to ensure their claims are not unfounded.
If an account only publicizes its recent success (e.g., “12-3 in the last week!” or “8-3 on Monday Night Football this season!”), it’s more likely a con artist because that kind of promotion is usually reserved for accounts with little other betting work to show off.
If they had one, they would have posted their winning streak or lifetime percentage on their profiles.
3. Style Never Took the Place of Substance.
If you see a sports handicapping account which conveys its picks via memes, inspirational messages, and even some sports news, we’d recommend you keep searching.
We recommend avoiding scamdicappers who pretend to be Jordan Belfort, posting pictures of him or quotes from Leonardo DiCaprio in the Wolf of Wall Street. To use any likeness of a known criminal is just plain dumb, especially if you’re a con artist.
The best handicappers tend to spend a bulk of their time researching and selecting winning picks, which they then sell to clients. They don’t waste time trying to make you laugh or pick you up with a motivational quote. Winners, over a long enough timeline, come to light. Be wary of any page or site that veers from this formula.
4. Different Membership Options
No reputable sports handicapping service offers tiered membership. Any Instagram account that does this is almost certainly a scammer.
Touts that offer varying subscription rates, depending on the length of time chosen, can still be legitimate; this is just a way to categorize clients. However, a tout should never be giving different picks to different clients based on price.
The more different membership tiers a gambling service offers, the better its chances of luring in winning gamblers. Scamdicappers use this to their advantage by marketing their best-performing tiers to more clients while avoiding mentioning the losing tiers, which would be more frequent than the winning ones.
No handicapper can ensure that its clients will be on a constant winning streak, and they assure you that you will be winning with them at a rate of 60% or even higher—obvious signs of someone trying to scam you.
Sports betting is a game of skill, not a guarantee of success. Any good sports bettor will tell you that their win percentage can’t surpass 55%. Bettors will break even at 52.4% (assuming standard -112 juice), while return-on-investment is normally at 53.4% and doubles again for every percentage above that.
Let me give an example that will illustrate my point. If a bettor starts off with $1,000 and then goes on to bet 10% of his funds each day at a win percentage of 60%, he'll have acquired more than $5 million after five years. Betting more aggressively isn't going to help the Instagram-based tout beat the best sports bettors in the world either; 55% is as high as his win rate can climb. Anything more than that is purely fictional.
5. Accounts that Have Attracted many Followers, but No Comments
Today, anyone can purchase Instagram followers, as well as likes. Scamdicappers use this common trick to make their accounts look more legitimate than they really are.
The easiest way to detect a fake post is to look at the comment section. If there are over 1,000 likes but no comments, it is safe to assume the post is fake and being controlled by a scammer.
Do you trust an Amazon product that does not have any reviews? Most people do not. Similarly, do not use a handicapping service without any engagement noticeable from clients. Instagram numbers are not always forthcoming about telling the truth.
Sports Handicapping Services Available on Instagram?
Scamdicappers are constantly inventing new ways to trick clients into thinking they’re legitimate. Since social media tends to be decentralized, it’s challenging to determine which scamdicappers are real and which are fake.
If you keep a watchful eye out for the red flags listed above, you are less likely to be taken in by a fraud.
Our next article in this series on handicapping services covers the dos and don'ts of selecting a service. This will help you get value for your money!
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