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ASIC Sports Arbitrage Announcement

Posted by Aegist on April 30th, 2008

ASIC, the Australian Securities and Investments Commission have just posted an article warning consumers to be careful of “Sports Arbitrage Get Quick Rich” schemes. These are the same companies which we here at SAG have been warning consumers about for some time now.

The article observes that ASIC have received complaints about 23 different companies operating as “Sports Arbitrage Investment Opportunities”. I think that is even more than the number of companies that have been brought to my attention!

‘These operators usually ask for an upfront fee or a ‘licence fee’ of up to several thousand dollars to join their scheme and an additional ‘investment amount’ which they say they will use to ‘trade’ with.

Sound familiar?

‘They then try to fool consumers by using terms such as ‘trading’, ‘arbitrage trading’ and ‘strategic investment’ so that consumers believe that the operators are not gambling with their money, but rather ‘trading’ it on their behalf.

‘In some cases, however, there is not even any gambling taking place and the money is simply being taken from consumers’, Ms Rickard said.

The article then goes on to talk about how companies selling sports arbitrage ‘betting systems’ are in a different category to the companies selling ‘Investment programs’ and how complaints made against these companies are outside of the jurisdiction of ASIC. They recommend consumers who have paid large sums of money for arbitrage betting systems (alert services as we call them here on SAG) and feel they have been ripped off should contact the State office of Fair Trading, Consumer affairs, and/or the state Police Service.

‘We want to make it clear that we’re concerned that the language used may lead consumers to believe that this is a form of investment or trading. At best, it is in fact gambling. At worst, it may be a scam. We advise consumers to exercise a great deal of scepticism regarding anything labelled sports arbitrage.’

‘Consumers should also be aware that just because a business is trading as a registered company, or under a registered business name, it is not automatically legitimate. We recommend that consumers make diligent enquiries before investing their money, especially if the offer to invest comes out of the blue. When it comes to money and investments, the old saying that if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is, remains accurate and investors should be wary of investments offering returns that are unrealistic. If you cannot afford to lose the money, don’t invest,’ Ms Rickard added.

ASIC recommends consumers consider obtaining advice from a licensed financial advisor prior to making investment decisions. Consumers should also be aware that it is a legal requirement for a person or company who is selling investments in genuine financial products to hold an Australian Financial Services Licence (AFSL) or to be an authorised representative of a licensee. Consumers can find out if someone holds a AFSL by doing a quick, free and easy check on ASIC’s consumer website, http://www.fido.gov.au.

Read the whole article here.

To see more of our own investigation into these operations, see these articles and this forum at ArbForum.

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EasyOdds.eu Review - First Impressions

Posted by Aegist on April 30th, 2008

EasyOdds.eu are a brand new arbitrage alert service just launched. With a couple of days of looking through their service so far under my belt, my first impression is that they have some ambitious goals with some novel ideas, but are still struggling to get it all off the ground.

Being a brand new alert service in an already competitive market must surely be a difficult position, and the advice I regularly offer new alert services is that offering something unique is a huge advantage. EasyOdds have offered two unique elements in their service - the ability to view a graph which shows a historic trend of the odds in that market at the bookmaker in question, and the ability to follow a link straight to the sport and market in the arb (rather than going to the homepage, then finding your way to the market yourself) - however their ‘newness’ is still very evident and you spend most of your time dealing with bugs and sub-optimal design flaws.

The fact is, most of the time there is no active link to the bookmaker at all, let alone an active link straight to the market in question - very rarely is this actually the case. Similarly the historic data is pretty rare. Most annoying is the fact that all of the links open in the same window - so following the link to the bookmaker (and the specific market in question) actually takes you away from EasyOdds! Ditto with the historic data on the odds - you suddenly find yourself looking at a small graphic where there used to be an alert service!

But this is exactly what I mean by “Newness”. This is such a simple bug that it should be incredibly easy to fix. Hopefully with time more bookmakers and markets will be linked to and that feature will become more useful, as too will more historic data be accurately collected.

All of that being said, there is something which is far more important than unique elements, novel approaches and new gadgets - reliable arbs. Having run EasyOdds alongside my comparison alert service for these few days has really made me realise how I have probably been giving the wrong advice all this time: if you want to launch a new alert service and stand out in this competitive market - just make an alert service which can actually get all of the odds and compare them across all of the bookmakers accurately, and you will have a market leader. It doesn’t even need to be very fast - just thorough and accurate.

What continues to surprise me when I compare alert services side by side, is how two different pieces of software which both claim to search the same sports across the same bookmakers can consistently find different arbs. Unfortunately, EasyOdds has missed many arbs which my comparison service has found - but that being said, it has also found one or two which the comparison service didn’t. Surely it is possible to make one service which finds them all!?!

Lastly, the display needs improving. It is crammed and hard to understand at first. Even once you adjust to it and understand all of the elements, they still cram words into small boxes and are forced to abbreviate league and player names. This means they often leave out small bits of crucial information, forcing you to inspect each of the possible tennis tournaments on at the time, or go through every spanish soccer league one at a time until you find the game in question. Organising arbitrage alert displays is never an easy task, but it is an important one.

So, from my first impressions of EasyOdds I can appreciate some of their new innovations and I look forward to watching those ideas develop, but at this stage of their foray into arbitrage, they still have a lot of basics to improve upon and bugs to fix. I will continue to run EasyOdds.eu alongside my comparison alert service for the next 3 weeks, and continue to post observations over that time as I feel necessary. A final review will be posted at the end.

EasyOdds.eu is one of the most recent alert services to be launched, and as such are largely unknown at this stage. They have recently been added to the comprehensive SAG arbitrage alert service page, and will soon be added to the SureBetBookies bookmaker database so you can browse through the details of their bookmakers.

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Site Updates, Trading Updates and other tid bits

Posted by Aegist on April 25th, 2008

Well it has been a long time since I have made a general update posting here, so I might as well make one now.

There are 3 or so new alert services on the market, and I will be adding them to the alert service page very soon, as well as the removal of AusSoft, the very expensive upfront payment alert service - their website is offline now and no information is available about how their clients fare without an active company maintaining the software…

I am also actively trading once again now that I have managed to get some more free time during trading hours. This is motivating me to do more work on the site and particularly in SureBetBookies. I hope to work on and complete the arbitrage section of SAG sometime over the next few months (after a year of promises…) and also plan to work on adding more bookmakers to the SureBetBookies database. I also intend to add the new alert service to the database, so that will allow people to compare the bookmakers across the newer alerts.

That being said, if any alert service vendors want a current review of their software, then I am able to do that once again (having funded bookmakers and the time to actually watch the software, work with it, learn it, and place the trades). So if anyone alert service admins would like me to review their software, please email me and we’ll discuss the details.

Shane

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