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Fallout from Suncity Equities and Investments

Posted by Aegist on July 16th, 2008

It looks like another one of these Arbitrage investment schemes has disappeared with a lot of money that they didn’t own. There has been a long line of very upset people posting at ArbForum over the past few days because none of them are able to make any contact with Suncity Equities and Investments at all, and it looks like the company have simply closed up shop and disappeared.

It is worth drawing the attention of any new readers here to an article I published about 6 months ago: St Gallens Investments, Suncity Equities and Investments and other Arbitrage Investments AGAIN and the associated discussion on ArbForum at around the same time: Suncity Equities and Investments

Notice how the person I was directly replying to in my opening post of the ArbForum thread was impressed because Suncity had already paid out money requested? THIS IS NORMAL for a Ponzi scam. This should never be seen as evidence of legitimacy. That same article in which I first mentioned Suncity EI also mentions AFL Arbitrage Systems, the company publicly shamed into hiding by A Current Affair a couple of months ago. I don’t know anything for certain about any of the other companies mentioned in that article yet, but when we post warnings about not investing in companies of this nature, we aren’t making it up just for fun. It is clear that a lot of people have been really badly hurt by Suncity and by AFL Arbitrage systems - and I hate watching it happen.

So, to the next person who posts on ArbForum, or emails me directly about some ‘too good to be true’ arbitrage-like investment scheme which they want a second opinion on, this is my reply to you:

Maybe the company you are asking about is legitimate, maybe they have the most pure of intentions, but there is no way of really knowing. This industry has a shocking record, and any investment made with a company claiming to do anything like this, must be taken as an almost guaranteed loss in terms of risk - I don’t care if they say “No Risk” on their website, the very fact that they say that makes me even more certain they are a guaranteed loss. If someone you know has received payments already from this company, I don’t care - still considered a 99% risk of loss.

The only thing you can really use to make sure the company you are dealing with is legitimate, is to ensure their accountability - force them to take responsibility for whatever they do. A name and a phone number does not make someone accountable. Names can be lied about/faked, and phone numbers can be cut off. You want accurate licensing (appropriate to what they are doing!). You want a large, well known, highly visible company which can not disappear - this forces someone to take responsibility.

In short - my advice is don’t give them your money. You are far more likely to make money by putting it all on ‘0′ at your local casino.

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SureBetBookies Mark 2 - Major improvements!

Posted by Aegist on July 11th, 2008

SureBetBookies has just seen significant improvements added to it over the past week, and the whole range of improvements are now live and ready to use.

We have added Currency information for every bookmaker in the database, licensing location information, sign up bonus offer details, improved the filtering and exclusion options available, and improved the sorting function on the results. The result is that it should be more helpful than ever to help you find the most profitable bookmakers for you to register with, depending on your currency, deposit methods, location etc.

I’m really excited about the currency information because this also allows you to easily inspect which currency is the most commonly accepted - currently USD with 69 accepting it out of 77 active bookmakers in the database, followed by GBP at 54, and EUR at 53. But better than just knowing which ones are the most commonly accepted ones (which were pretty obvious anyway), you can see exactly how many books accept your local currency and decide whether it is worth converting to a foreign currency or not. 25 of the 77 accept AUD - significantly less, but all of them are good strong sportsbooks worth using too.

We also added the ability to exclude bookmakers below selected ratings. So if you don’t care for books below a B or C rating, it is easy to remove them from the results.

This all means that it is now easier than ever to look at arbitrage for the first time, and simply go to SureBetBookies  and list the exact criteria that you need for a bookmaker, and have a concise list of bookmakers which are perfect for you. Better still, you can then sort that list by bonus offers, and get instant direction on how to approach signing up for them - claiming every bonus you can as you go.

More profit, faster, easier - helping the learning process go a little smoother.

See the improved Sure Bet Bookies database.

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Out of the Office

Posted by Aegist on June 2nd, 2008

Super quick post to just say that I won’t be around for the next couple of weeks. So I apologise up front for not responding to emails, forum posts and anything else as quick as I normally do. I’ll be back again in a couple of weeks!

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Arbitrage Investment Scams on A Current Affair

Posted by Aegist on May 30th, 2008

Well, A Current Affair have just run a story on “Call centre Scams” - talking to people who have been ripped off by companies claiming to do sports arbitrage trading for them. I am pretty sure this story was mostly initiated by the article ASIC published recently. They referred to the article published by ASIC, including the fact that ASIC have received complaints about 23 different “Arbitrage Investment” companies, but specifically spoke to people who had lost large sums of money (over $8000) with their dealings with AFL Arbitrage (Kent Woodhouse & Associates Pty Ltd).

I’m really glad they ran the story - hopefully it will mean less people will lose such large amounts of money to these companies. My limitation in this role is that people will only find my articles providing general warnings about companies offering such services if they search the internet first. I can’t actively warn people. ACA can at least warn a lot of people *before* they are contacted, and so hopefully this has now been done.

My only regret about the story is that they make it sound like Arbitrage itself is a complete scam. I can understand the need to do this - it is difficult to convey the idea that “Under no circumstances should you trust anyone selling you something like this” while also saying “by the way, the theory behind it makes sense…”. Obviously it isn’t as simple as that, and so it is impractical to go into details. Easier to just say - “It’s a scam, avoid it”.

The most important message in my opinion, is that someone asking you for money, so that they can make you lots of money …they just have to be full of it. If they can make lots of money with any money, why would they need your money? It doesn’t make sense, it never will, so just don’t fall for it.

Here is the video of the story:

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mySurebets, Sure Bet Bookies and SureBet Zone

Posted by Aegist on May 23rd, 2008

Wow, its a Surebet-a-thon in that title isn’t it?

First of all, mySurebets is a brand new service just launched, and I have added them to the arbitrage alert service page *and* SureBetBookies (I’m quite proud of my efficiency there, but please, hold your applause…).

Since I was updating SureBetBookies with a new alert service, I also added Oddstorm, who I embarrassingly forgot to add when I did the major update to it a few weeks ago. Sorry Oddstorm! All good now though, users can easily search Oddstorm bookies as well as any other alert service bookmakers.

I also removed Surebet Zone from the SBB database because Surebet Zone are no longer taking subscribers and are ‘restructuring’ their website. So they may be back with a change, or they may stop doing arbitrage altogether - not sure at this stage. Accordingly, they have been moved into the “Inactive” section of the alerts page.

In other news, I am actually going to finally finish the 3rd section of SAG - the how to trade section. It has been a long time coming, but I swear I’ll do it this time. I have written much of it out, just proof reading and re-structuring it so that it all makes sense - it is very difficult to explain! We are also working on growing SureBetBookies rapidly over the next few weeks. The initial goal is 150 bookmakers, but we may even make this 200 bookmakers as we are moving pretty fast now.

And finally, in light of the interest in my previous article about Arbitrage Trading as being completely neglected by the Work At Home industry - if anyone who operates a work at home blog or website is interested in writing about Sports Arbitrage (offering something *unique* to your readers), feel free to contact me for more information, more resources, or just to ask a few questions. I may also consider writing articles myself if requested.

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