One of the highest-profile cases of a tipster scamming their clients came to a close in the United States in 2017, 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.
Who was Adam Meyer?
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 million 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'.
How the scam evolved
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.
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 ten million dollar 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 that he was working undercover for the FBI, before finally being sent down for eight years.
Meyer's conviction
Ultimately, Meyer was officially convicted for the crimes of fraud, extortion, racketeering, and brandishing a firearm, rather than for being a dodgy tipster. However, 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.
These days, we have more platforms available (such as ours here at Tipstrr.com), who can monitor, regulate and verify these self-proclaimed bookie-beaters and provide reliable and verifiable information that would expose such behaviour.
Now that you've learned a bit of history, why not check out our bookmaker reviews to see what's on offer from the most popular bookmakers?