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Posted by Aegist on July 15th, 2010
Rebel Betting have just launched version 3.1 of their software. To promote the latest upgrade, they are offering the rest of July free to anyone who subscribes to their service. Their announcement follows:
If you subscribe for a month or more, you will get the rest of July for free. (So if you hurry, you’ll get more than two weeks!)
The Fine Print: This works for all users, even if you’re already a subscriber, but can’t be combined with other offers.
After you have subscribed, reply to this email with your username and mention you suffer from “Post World Cup Depression” to get the free days.One new bookie, several new markets and new arbs
RebelBetting version 3.1 was released last week. We’ve added Betsafe and European Handicap, which means 25 more cross market combinations (and a lot of new arbs). Download Here.
So now is a pretty good time to give RebelBetting a month+ try out.
Posted by Aegist on July 8th, 2010
If you have been approached by an arbitrage trading company which is looking for investors, do not give them any of your money. Companies which can promise to make you the returns typically claimed by these types of companies (5% will never need to seek out public investors. End of story. So any company which is cold-contacting members of the public looking for investors is without doubt a scam.
I am going to re-state the above point again so that you can understand it – because this is the only argument that should be needed. If a company can promise you a return higher than a high interest bank loan, then why would they need your money? Paying you such a high premium is an unnecessary expense when they could just get a bank loan, or get some money from friends to get it started and then grow their own capital exponentially until they have more than enough money and no need to share it with anyone.
If a company can make 10% profit each month (and most promise more than this) on an uncapped volume, then you do NOT need investors. Ever. Arbitrage trading can make about 10% return per month, per trader, up to a limitted volume – thus it won’t compound past a certain amount. Companies soliciting investors publicly are trying to get a lot more than the trading limit of an arbitrage trader can handle, and promising to pay out more than a team of arbitrage traders can make.
This is so important. They LOOK real. They don’t print “We’re a Scam” on their brochure or their website. They imply that they are supported or affiliated with respectable companies. They claim to be licensed and verified as reliable (they are con men! They LIE!). Their websites and brochures often look really really good. They have really nice sales people who really take care of you and try their best to help you and talk to you about their grandmother who is sick and relies on their pay check to get her medication….
None of that matters. It can all be faked. It can all be made up. What cannot be faked though, is the fact that any company promising to make you high returns on an arbitrage investment never actually needs investments from the public. So don’t fall for the glitz and the polish – stick with the logic.
A shill is someone who pretends to be a customer or potential customer of the company in question but is in fact an employee or owner of that company. Shills are also sometimes known as sock puppets. The important thing to learn about these shills is that they aren’t always obvious. They don’t just come in and say “I’m a customer, and I like this company” – they use numerous strategies (and often several identities) to acheive a result. For example:
It is worth noting that some companies claiming to do arbitrage trading for your profit are in fact Ponzi Schemes which take investments in for a fixed period in order to enable them to actually pay out some of their members. They aren’t actually trading for you, what they are doing is using the growing pool of investment funds to pay the small percentage of people who reach the end of their investment period who request a withdrawal. These people are then so excited that they made so much money on their investment that they often happily re-invest the money, and more importantly, happily tell everyone they know how much money they have made and how great an investment it is. These people aren’t technically shills, but they have the same effect. They create positive buzz around the ponzi scam which brings in more money, which allows the scammers to eventually close up shop and disappear with much more money than they would have been able to get without this positive buzz.
The scams which aren’t ponzis though, are typically just outright theft. They claim to pay you back your money, but when it comes to the crunch, they just delay payments for a while before ceasing all communication.
A side note worth making here, is that for every company that has contacted you, there seems to be 3 or 4 others actively trading who haven’t contacted you, and more companies to follow. So if for insane reason you aren’t immediately convinced by what I have said here, remember that despite what these slick salesmen say, there really is no rush. They will take your money in a week or two weeks or a month or two if they are still around. In fact, using a time buffer is a great way of seeing some of their lies. If they claim to be accepting no more deposits after this week (or anything else like that), then wait for a week and watch them change their story.
In general though, just remember that there is no rush. Many of these companies exist, and many more will come. Take you time, read what the Australian government says in all of its warning, and what all of the experienced arbers say on ArbForum, and just consider what it will feel like to lose all of your investment.
One of the easiest ways to immunise yourself against arbitrage scams, is simply to understand arbitrage. When the experienced arbers call ‘scam’ against investment companies on the forums it is usually because the company claiming to ‘do arbitrage’ are publicly displaying their ignorance of arbitrage on their own websites. They show daily returns on total trading capital (often showing multiple trades each day), or they show $10,000 bets with bookmakers that only accept $500 bets. These sorts of details mean nothing to the average person, but to an experienced arbitrage trader, they are dead give away’s that the company in question has never done arbitrage itself and is a complete scam.
If you aren’t interested in spending 6 months or more getting experience in arb trading yourself, then you should give the experienced arb traders on arbforum and other arbitrage forums the benefit of the doubt when they recommend against investing in an arbitrage investment company.
This has happened over and over again already. So many of these arbitrage investment scams have been created, have scammed people out of many thousands of dollars each, then run off in to the night. Some of them have been chased by media crews, some have been put in prison, some have been harrassed by ex-victims. But most of them get away with it and start up a brand new company and do it all over again – and this time, they use all that they learnt on the previous run and do a better job!!
Australian Competition and Consumer Commission Document on Sports Investment Scams
Sports Arbitrage Schemes on ScamWatch.gov.au
ACCC Article on Sports Arbitrage Scams
Queensland Police Arbitrage Scam Investigation
Scam Section on ArbForum.Co.Uk
Posted by Aegist on June 3rd, 2010
Originally posted on ShaneGreenup.com
Googling “Shane Greenup” these days sadly places a scam website, OzRipOff.com way too high in the results. Ever since September last year I have been targetted by a couple of scammers who run Sports Arbitrage Investment and Software scams as part of their defamation campaign against all critics and competitors. As the owner of Sports Arbitrage Guide, the most trusted and relied upon information resource in the Sports Arbitrage world, I am obviously both a competitor (Compare all alert services before buying!*), and a critic (Don’t get ripped off by arbitrage scams) of these scammers. Therefore, the scammers (in this specific instance, the individuals behind CSI Arbitrage) use their fraudulent and illegal website OzRipOff.com to defame me and others.
*It is worth noting that CSI Arbitrage was in this comprehensive list up until a few weeks ago when it was proven conclusively to me that they were indeed a scam, lying about their activities, and behind OzRipOff.com – therefore responsible for the baseless assault on my integrity and reputation.Since the original defamatory post was a made, a second post about me and Sports Arbitrage Guide has also been posted. The first article, titled simply, “Shane Greenup Wanker” was replaced on the front page of OzRipOff with the much more aggressively titled “Shane Greenup, the sexual deviate’s sportsarbitrageguide scam”.
In the first article, the author simply insults me and attempts to be intimidating. All of the comments are without doubt posted by the same person, with one exception, the first post by “honest”, which I posted in an attempt to inform ignorant readers of the article of the context in which the post was made. The DAY after making this post, my email account, paypal and moneybookers account were hacked, and a significant amount of money was stolen from me.
The second article simply attempts to undermine my integrity, honesty and reputation. It fails for several reasons, primarily missing the point of Sports Arbitrage Guide being a “Free Guide” and also missing the fact that SAG covers every single arbitrage alert service in the market – thus making it impossible for their lies to be even close to reality – there is no way that I personally own every single arbitrage alert software in the market. Not to mention, that the whole thing is a lie anyway – I don’t run any alert service, I “Affiliate” with every alert service which runs an affiliate program, and happily claim whatever small commission I can from the sales off my website, but I am otherwise not associated with these companies at all. But anyone can see that for themselves just by looking – and you can also see the numerous ones which do NOT run affiliate programs, which are also reviewed in my comprehensive* listing of alert service providers. (*Comprehesnive excluding all known SCAM products and services not yet made known to me)
I knew CSI Arbitrage was behind this assault on my reputation, but what I did not know until recently, was that the entire website (OzRipOff.com) was operated by the same people who run CSI. The proof came when I compared the ip addresses of the emails I received from Antoinette Mead, the director of Cohen Strachan Investment, and the ip address of the emails I received from “John Taylor” of OzRipOff.com – They were identical. 59.167.219.109
Further evidence came when Richard Partington posted on OzRipOff about CSI Arbitrage (http://www.ozripoff.com/report-view/826-cohen-screwyouoveryour-investment), and overnight his report of a real rip-off, was quickly turned around into defamatory attack on his character (equally backed up with the same number and style of ‘user comments’ as can be seen on my own articles – further evidence that the SAME PERSON is performing all of these posts and comments.). Anyone can test this fact out for themselves – go to OzRipOff.com right now, and post a report about CSI Arbitrage being a scam, and I guarantee it will be removed – unlike every other article about any other company, which requires you to spend $6000 to have an ‘investigator’ investigate you and clear your name…
Furthermore, only in the last week, CSI actually went and reposted the same lies about me on OzRipOff.com into their own blog (csiarbitrage.com.au/blogview/directors-reponse-re-richard-partington-322). They repeat the lie about the alert services being mine, and incorrectly assume that Richard Partington is somehow under my control or direction. I met Richard Partington for the first time when I went to his CTTT hearing against CSI Arbitrage in Gosford – he was already well under way in his legal proceedings against them, and had already spent a long time investigating them before I even met them. I went to the hearing simply out of duty to my visitors and readers – I felt obliged to find out what was going on. Sadly, I was the only other person who turned up on the day – not even Antoinette Mead (Toni Mead) showed up, but instead partook in the hearing via telephone… The judge did incorrectly assume I was a friend of Richards at the time (since I was there, and no one else was – it is a reasonable assumption), and introduced me to Antoinette Mead as such when the call connected – but the reality was that i was just trying to find the truth – as I always have. Since then, I have found the truth – and as all of this evidence is already demonstrating, it is not in CSI’s favour. So ironically, CSI’s accusation that Richard is working under my directions has the cart before the horse.
And finally, to segue nicely into the next topic, what sort of respectable company publicly names a mere moderator of a public forum, and identifies their geographical location and real name as a way of dealing with the fall out of a disgruntled customer? ArbForum.co.uk is NOT my website. There are 5 moderators there, and 1 administrator – and for some reason, they single me out personally in this way and attempt to make it sound like *I* am responsible for Richard’s ‘rants’. This is NOT respectable company behaviour, under any circumstances. It also completely misses the fact that I have probably deleted more of Richards posts than anyone in an attempt to keep him under control (he’s angry – and I don’t blame him).
TopOdds spent two years trying to infiltrate ArbForum. He cried scam at every arbitrage scam that was found – and brought plenty of new ones to everyone’s attention. He also spent a lot of time belittling the monthly subscription services (in exactly the same way that they were belittled in the OzRipOff and CSI articles), saying that they were useless and a waste of money. Lastly, he spent a lot of time talking about how “he wouldn’t sell everything he knew for anything less than $50,000!” In short, he spent his whole time on arbforum trying to sound like an experience professional arber, and tried to make $100 a month for an alert service sound too expensive, but $17,600 for some training and software cheap.
And then he posted this thread on arbforum. Sadly, my own replies there show my ignorance at the time, but that was the way it went down. It is clear now that TopOdds was indeed a Shill from the beginning. When confronted with such accusations, he rants:
im not a customer,i dont own it,i dont work for them,i didnt build the app,im not paul perry!(as far as i know hes a leading sydney racing identy/trianer – so shouldnt be hard to find!)
Sorry it that kills the dream of some here but facts are facts -end of story!
Topodds is opinionated,not a fence sitter,not policly correct,right wing but not a lier!
Yet comparing his IP used to make the posts on ArbForum, with the IP used to log in to trial the Carbon A software 2 years ago, and I found (surprise!) that Topodds was in FACT posting on arbforum from CSI’s office. (btw, note the trades on that screenshot – none of them are arbs?!??!?!)
No respectable company would spend 2 YEARS setting up such a deep shill. Systematically trying to undermine every competitor in the marketplace, legitimate or not, while lying the whole time about who he was, what his experience is, and what his intentions were.
Ironically, it was only because of TopOdds posted the review of CSI that all of this happened. I was happy to ignore CSI altogether – actively fighting scams and scammers didn’t seem worth my time, i had done my part by warning people REPEATEDLY on SAG about scams already – but then TopOdds made his post, and Richard Partington came on the scene making lots of noise – and TopOdds started to defend CSI a little bit too hard. If it wasn’t for TopOdds’ great work defending CSI, I may have never got suspicious. And if it wasn’t for CSI making this personal – by making defamatory comments about me online, and trying to harm my reputation, I don’t think i would have bothered going to all this trouble of reporting their illegal activities to the police, the ACCC, ASIC, Politicians and media outlets, not to mention this much more public posting, which ultimately will reveal their true criminal nature once and for all – hopefully stopping the need for people to bother emailing Richard or myself any more, unsure whether CSI is a scam or not…
So congratulations CSI – Antoinette Mead, Larry pickering, and Wayne Evans – you actually did this all to yourselves.
As stated in my original article in 2007, CSI Arbitrage’s Carbon A steals it’s arbitrage alert feed from SportsPunter. I thought that SportsPunter had fixed the problem from their end, but a statutory declaration from an ex employee of CSI states that the attempt to stop CSI from stealing and reselling their feed for the biggest mark-up ever didn’t completely work, and CSI continued to use Sports Punter’s feed. I am not certain that they still use SportsPunters arb feed now, but it was clear that CSI never intended on making their own odds collection and analysis service – they just made someone else’s work look like it belonged to them.
You can also see in that stat dec, that Luke states that he worked for Larry Pickering. Antoinette (toni) Mead is just the fall person. She’s the one who will end up in prison when the authorities finally catch up with all of these criminals. Today Tonight have previously run a story on Larry, reporting his inability to afford maintenance on his children, but maintaining his luxury penthouses and his own helicopter. This is what life is like when you have no ‘legal’ income. The search results which tell the story of Larry’s long history with horse racing software and now arbitrage investment schemes speaks for itself.
And while OzRipOff.com continues to post articles calling me a scammer and worse, they have not once provided any form of evidence or argument in support of their claims. Meanwhile, as clearly shown in this article, I have plenty of evidence proving their lies, their corruption, and their fraud.
If you have been ripped off by CSI Arbitrage, or any of the previous arbitrage or horse racing scams, then keep an eye out – a group of pissed off people are snowballing into a very large angry mob, who want justice. Take the time to subscribe to this thread on ArbForum, and follow all of the directions posted by Richard – he has done tremendous work finding every avenue possible to make these con men (and woman) accountable for their crimes.
Posted by Aegist on May 14th, 2010
Two new alert service providers have been added to the arbitrage alert services page and they have been added to a brand new category – Betting Shop Arbitrage Alert Services.
Betting Shop Arbitrage (Carbing for short) is arbing between the fixed odds coupons found in bricks and mortar betting shops (in the UK only at this stage) and the online odds markets. The idea is that because the fixed odds coupons are set daily (?), and online odds fluctuation constantly, you can catch out the betting shops when prices change online and the betting shops don’t update their odds. You just have to do the legwork of getting to the betting shop itself in order to place that side of the arb.
These two new alert services work by collecting odds from the main betting shop bookmakers each day and running those coupon odds against online odds. This style of arbing may produces less arbs than standard online arbing, but the percentage return can regularly be much higher than most online only arbs – this is because the coupon odds are slow to move, and a big change can create a large arb, without the risk of the old ‘palpable error’ rule being used to void your bet.
So if you live in the UK, and you have easy access to a couple of the major betting shops, these new alert services may provide a valuable addition to your arbing income, for quite a cheap price. CouponArbitrage.com and HighStreetArbitrage.com are now both listed on the arb alerts page, and each have their own discussion threads on ArbForum.
Posted by Aegist on April 21st, 2010
I have decided to repost this old, yet incredibly valuable article to remind people not to be ripped off by companies just trying to take them for a ride. As warned in the article below, regardless of the intentions of the companies who sell arbitrage software for many thousands of dollars, the results may not be as desired by the person involved. It might be possible to blame the customer for not being prepared, or capable or any other reason why it is their fault, but that is precisely one of the reasons why EVERYONE should avoid buying arbitrage alert software like this.
Evidence of this sort of problem is visible right now in ArbForum where someone is sueing Cohen Strachan Investments because they were unsatisfied with the product.
It has been claimed that the customer never had enough funds to trade with and that he has made no attempt to learn how to trade etc – but that is precisely part of the problem – he was the ignorant one going into the purchase! He clearly didn’t understand what was expected, or what was needed, or how poorly he was going to fare. And as soon as he understood, he didn’t want to be part of it anymore. But what could he do? He just parted with over $16,000!!
So once again, don’t just evaluate the product itself – consider the whole picture. A monthly service is easy to walk away from. A single upfront payment service can wipe out all of your savings and give you nothing in return.
Original Article Follows:
We have recently added a new category to our complete list of Arbitrage Alert Services titled “Non-Subscription Based Software“. This was added because a couple of companies have recently started selling software in this manner and it seemed appropriate that they be distinguished on this fact. The three entries currently in this section charge no ongoing fee, but instead require one single upfront payment. In some sense it may seem like a sound investment; it is easy to rationalise that the profits made from arbing will eventually pay them off and you will be able to continue arbing for free for the rest of your life if you wanted… but there are quite a few concerns which need to be pointed out when considering taking a non-subscription based offer.
For instance, what happens if:
Arbing is not what you thought and after a month or two you want to quit?This is the most obvious risk for all newbies to sports arbitrage trading, and probably the most common problem. Arbitrage can easily be made to sound very enticing. It is easy to make it look like arbitrage is free money for anyone who wants it, and many companies use that methodology when trying to sell their software. Reality of course is very rarely ideal, and the hands on experience of arbitrage could take all of the excitement out of the idea. Within a month or two the average person just isn’t interested anymore. If you are using a subscription based service then you simply stop paying the monthly fee and move on, no loss incurred (even your trading balances are usually intact, which is one of the best aspects of arbitrage!) However if you are using a non-subscription based service, and you have just paid a huge upfront fee for the software; you’re stuck with it. Refund policies rarely cover “I don’t want it anymore” and you are now out of pocket for the entire fee paid.
You gain experience and start to realise that the software isn’t as good as you first thought?This is a general risk which most people new to arbitrage will never think of. If you don’t know what arbitrage really is, how it really works, and don’t have years of experience doing it, how could you possibly know what is good quality? Making something look all shiny and fancy is much easier than making something work well. If you are considering paying a huge upfront fee for some software, you better know it is high quality, otherwise you could be basically giving away good money for nothing. If there is no decent trial period where you can have a chance to see how well it really works for yourself, then that is definitely a good reason to be concerned. Similar to the first concern, there is very rarely a refund policy for “It’s not as good as I expected.” If you were in a subscription based service, you could simply stop paying your subscriptions and move to a better service. When it comes to one off payments though, you are trapped and have to accept the product you have paid for. You could complain to the company providing the software, but what real incentive do they have to improve their service? They already have your money and there is no financial incentive for them to invest in improving things when they know that their product can still bring in new clients who know as little as you did when you started.
The arbs stop being delivered, or The quality of arbs decline over time?The fact which most people don’t realise with alert services, is that it isn’t the software package you are really buying. What you are really paying for, is the ongoing ‘service’ provided by the owner of the arbitrage alert feed to continue providing high quality arbs. With most alert software, the software you have or the website you log into is just a the ‘client side’ of the whole package. The real work is done on the ‘server side’. That means that the real work being done on a server somewhere else, and the results are simply being displayed in your software or on the web page you view. So it is very important that the service side aspect of your alert software is maintained because without the server working, your software is completely useless. This is very important because the software which runs on the server side of an arbitrage alert service is still just stupid software blindly doing what it has been programmed to do, and in every case this will requires constant human attention to ensure it is finding the right odds for the right sport at the right bookmaker for it to work. It can’t do this itself because the work that it is doing (finding odds from many different bookmakers, standardising them into a comparable format, calculating arbitrages and presenting the data to clients) is based on information which is constantly changed. So when Bookmaker A decides that they want to do a complete redesign of their website, the alert software pulling odds from their website will need to be recalibrated to find the odds in their new design. And when Bookmaker B decides that they are going to move their XML feed (where odds are provided to most odds comparison websites etc) to a new server, the alert software will have to be pointed to that new feed. Or if Bookmaker C changes the naming protocol for all of the sports, will the alert service still be able to match up odds for that bookmaker with all of the other bookmakers for each particular sport and market?
Bookmakers are very dynamic. They change regularly, and there are a LOT of them out there so there is continuous ongoing work in ensuring that your alert service works well. That is why most alert services require ongoing monthly fees. You aren’t paying for the software alone, you are paying for the continued performence of the software. You are paying to make sure the server which provides the alert software with its arbs keeps working! Which brings us to the bigger concern raised in this point: What happens if the alerts simply stop coming? The company which sells you alert service software for thousands of dollars goes bankrupt for unforseeable reason (or disappears for any reason for that matter) and they have to remove their server which does all of the real work for alert service software? The software which was worth so much is now worth nothing. Without the stream of arbs being fed through to your client side software, all of its fancy features, calculators, clever displays and functions are completely worthless.
As with the previous two points, having already paid for the product, what incentive does the company providing the software have to maintain the quality of their arbs? With a subscription based service, if their quality drops you can quickly and easily move to a better service. If the company goes out of business and their arb feeds stops, you have no recompense and worthless software. If you are paying on a monthly basis though, then you have not lost anything other than maybe a months fee (at most). There is no real way of knowing for sure than any of these scenarios won’t happen, either accidentally, purposefully, or through complete apathy. Regardless of the cause though, the risk to the consumer is real and must be taken into account.
When it comes down to it, you may be certain that concern #1 is not a problem for you: you are certain that you want to arb for the rest of your life. Maybe even point #2 doesn’t apply: you are already experienced and the demonstration/trial you had of the product proved that it was the best software on the market. Point 3 though is inescapable. You have no control over it and the risk will always be there.
When you are looking at a non-subscription based service, you are basically betting that you will get its value out before one of the above risks are realised. As most arbers are risk adverse (the very idea of arbitrage is to reduce risk to a negligible level) I expect that most would prefer to take the ‘surebet’ option and avoid the risk altogether. Of course in the end it does depend on the cost. For example, JuiceTrading is one of the programs in the “Non-Subscription Based Software” field, but its cost of only $99 means that it only needs to work for less than a month before it pays for itself in comparison to the monthly subscriptions which usually cost around the same per month anyway. It is when the cost is significantly higher that the extra concern is warranted.
To just conclude the point of this article, I think it is worth contrasting the above risks, with the benefits that come with paying an ongoing monthly subscriptions.
When you need to pay for each month as it comes:
You have influenceTo ensure ongoing profit the provider has to keep his customers happy. If the service declines in performance, then many customers will leave and it will have a very real tangible impact on the profit of the provider. Thus there is a lot of incentive for the provider to maintain a high quality feed and to ensure their customers are happy.
The business model is much more stableMost people know that it is easier to keep a customer than it is to find a new one, so services which make ongoing profits from each individual customer they already have are much more likely to stick around longer than business which are constantly fighting to get new customers in order to make a profit. Non-subscription based services have no other product to sell to their current customers, so the customer they have already worked so hard to get, are now worthless to them.
You have freedom to chooseAs long as you have only paid for a month at a time, at the end of every month, you can pick a different service. You are never locked in, and even if things go wrong, you can only lose a small amount of money. Freedom, drastically reduced risk, and no concerns.
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