The gambling tips scammer

Tony Levene investigates an email from a gambling tipster which promises he will be very rich indeed....

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It's impossible to ignore that football is back – with the World Cup and pre-season friendlies, it seems it was only away a matter of days.

And this means your friendly neighbourhood bookmaker will be listing football bets in the window. These range from a simple “team X to win” to the very complex “Team X to win 3-2 but be 2-1 down at half time with player Y the first to score.” Pulling off the second bet will win you a lot more than the first.

With all those possibilities plus wall to wall Sky coverage, football has now overtaken horse racing as our top way to enrich the bookies.

So, it's not surprising emails from tipsters claiming they can beat the bookies and make me a fortune from virtually nothing now feature heavily in my in-box.

The mysterious Mr X

One promoted Mr X. No, I am not making this up or changing the name to protect the innocent. He really calls himself Mr X.

The email said I would have been very rich by now following Mr X's football tips. It detailed a long list of wins from his recommendations.

If I sign up for a direct debit, I can get a one month free trial and then I pay £79 for a year's subscription to his magazine.

Now I have no doubt this newsletter will arrive every month, backed by the direct debit guarantee.

But Mr X is not just a football genius. His abilities cover almost everything other than which of two moths will burn on a light bulb first. He boasts winners in rugby, tennis, golf, the X-Factor, Gaelic football and the Turner Prize.

Now, I know the X-Factor and the Turner can be bizarre and there is no accounting for taste. But golf and Gaelic football as well? Mr X must truly be a genius, pushing Leonardo da Vinci and Albert Einstein into the shade.

According to the 18 page website sales pitch, the magazine does only finds winners including Amy Winehouse to win a Brit for best female and Kayne West to win Best Hip-hop act at the Mobo awards.

But this leads me to wonder whether Mr X has been selective in choosing the bets revealed on his website. There is not a single loser.

The winners are spread over two years, going back to early 2008. As Mr X promises up to 20 tips a month, two year's worth could total 480 tips. Now how many others were winners? What would have happened if I had backed all of them?

Most are losers

One of my first jobs (a long time ago) involved a share tipping newsletter (long since defunct). The author told me: “I recommend about 12 to 15 shares each week. Some go up, some go down – it's the law of averages. I follow the winners, and put them in my publicity. I ignore the losers. Most are losers.”

The magazine's owner used to run share tipping newsletters.

And here's another question for the mysterious Mr X. Can you get the odds quoted? If Mr X is as good as he claims, then all the bookies will subscribe to his service. They are not stupid. They would adjust the odds against punters as soon as they saw his advice. And they would do that before you got a chance to place your bet.

Here are my top tips – for free.

1. 1.      Never bet what you can't afford to lose.
2. 2.      Successful professional gamblers are as rare as hen's teeth.
3. 3.      The bookies always win – otherwise they would not be in business.
4. 4.      If I really knew what would win, I would keep it to myself and make a fortune rather than get involved with a publication costing the equivalent of 30p a day.

More: My phonecall with a sharedealing scammer  | The oldest scam in the book