One of the highest-profile cases of a tipster scamming their clients came to a close in the United States last year, when Adam Meyer, who hailed himself as “Sports Consultant to the Stars” was jailed for eight years for his part in a huge $45 million tipster fraud that caused Gary Sadoff, a wealthy beer distribution magnate from Wisconsin, to part with $25 million over a period of a few years.
Meyer was the self-appointed CEO of Real Money Sports, a betting consultancy site that charged up to a quarter of a million dollars a time for his betting advice. With such a fee, obviously the stakes were high, but Meyer claimed he had a 130-person research staff, ex-coaches and players among them, and said he ran computer simulations of upcoming games to fine-tune betting odds. With no real empirical evidence to back him up, he claimed to have a betting success rate of an unlikely 64.8%, including a much-publicised $1million dollar win on the Green Bay Packers lifting the Superbowl in 2010. Somewhere along the line he must have had at least some success, and regular television and radio appearances enabled him to use his charisma to publicise his profile and promote his position as a “tipping expert”.
His relationship with Sadoff began in 2007, when the Milwaukee-based businessman began buying Meyer’s tips and they became friends. Meyer’s services would extend his services to connecting his clients, Sadoff included, with offshore bookies who would unquestioningly accept their huge wagers, and at this point the plot dives into serious gangster territory.
Meyer claimed to have no connection with these dubious bookmakers, when all the time his clients’ money was being channelled into accounts that he himself controlled. When Sadoff decided to quit his gambling habit, Meyer had no intention of letting his cash cow escape, creating a fictional bookie gangster called Kent Wong, and telling Sadoff that Wong held them both responsible for a $10million debt, believing them to be partners. The whole sordid affair came to a dramatic end when Meyer had an associate confront Sadoff with a gun to coerce him into settling the “debt”. Meyer’s associate was sentenced to four years in jail, leaving Meyer himself to hide behind a variety of spurious defences ranging from insanity, drug addiction and the fact that he was working undercover for the FBI, before being sent down for eight years.
Ultimately, Meyer was officially convicted for the crimes of fraud, extortion, racketeering and brandishing a firearm, and not for being a dodgy tipster, but his case of tipster fraud to the nth degree is a cautionary tale that highlights that there is a potential out there for the tipster industry to be abused by unscrupulous opportunists, which should make us all the happier for being served and protected by websites like tipstrr.com, who provide reliable verifiable information that would prevent and expose such behaviour.