Sports Arbitrage Guide's Blog

Larry Pickering and CSI Arbitrage’s Day of Judgement

I believe that after more than 3 years, this chapter of scammery and dodginess may finally be coming to an end. Tomorrow, in the Daily Telegraph, and then at night on A Current Affair, Larry Pickering and his sports arbitrage scams will be the headline news.

CSI Arbitrage was surely the most successful Scam Pickering ever ran – and it certainly wasn’t the first. The internet was already littered with forum posts and websites dedicated to hunting Larry Pickering and his accomplices down. It just seemed that these warnings and efforts never achieved anything. It was if Larry was permanently beyond the reach of civil complaints and legal jurisdictions. He seemed to know how to steal millions of dollars from victims, and just walk away unscathed from the whole excange. No fear of repraisal or anything.

But in CSI – a company directed by Toni Mead (Larry’s name never appeared on ANY of the businesses he operated), they were so successful that their reach covered so many people, that they were bound to piss off a few too many people, and get one or two people who really knew how to make things happen off side. I don’t think anyone would have expected that in the end though, it would all come down to Ricky. My GOD does Ricky know how to make a scene!! He made so much noise, he rattled so many cages, he yelled so loudly, that it was impossible to ignore him. And thanks to his *relentless* efforts, he managed to gather a large following of pissed off people, attract a world class private investigator called Ken Gamble, and then bring these elements together to enable Ken to form the most water tight case against pickering and his international scam operations that could ever be wanted.

And then the Police still ignored it.

… seriously? WTF?!? I mean, I have been watching this shit unfold for the last 3 years. I watched CSI roll out the best looking cover for their scam that I have ever seen. They were selling software. It looked like a well crafted piece of software externally. Everything looked clean. And in the end, while I and everyone I know in arbitrage KNEW that $16,000 for a piece of arb software was too much, and we would never pay it… you can’t necessarily say that an expensive piece of software is a ‘scam’. I can’t anyway. It is just expensive. And if it doesn’t work as well as you want it to, then perhaps it is a ripoff. But a scam is purposeful deceit in my opinion, and they were clearly selling what they were advertising. Or so I thought…

It wasn’t until TopOdds, the ArbForum shill that Larry Pickering had spent over a year creating, posted a ‘review’ of CSI that Ricky came out of the woodwork and brought the fight with him. I had been convinced. I was shocked by TopOdd’s “review”, but I was conned all the same (not conned enough to part with my money – I still knew it was a bad deal..But I actually beleived that CSI was a legitimate business model). It wasn’t until Ricky, several months later, after constant fighting through the forums and some civil claims against CSI, explained to me how their scam worked….

CSI scammed its buyers in to depositing money in to their ‘private’ trading scheme by ‘giving’ them a free deposit of $2000 when they purchased the CSI software. BRILLIANT. So people pay $17,000 ish dollars for the software, and they get a ‘free’ $2000 deposited in to a private trading fund. The customer then gets trained and taught how to use the software and trade and all that, and after a month or two of trying to be an arb trader they realise that it isn’t as easy as they thought it would be, and they hadn’t made as much money as they hoped they would…. BUT… when they looked at the $2000 they had been given in the trading pool, they would see that it had grown by some astronomical amount. So why on earth should they keep wasting their time trying to trade with their own money, when they could deposit that money in with the “Professional Traders” that CSI had trading for them?

CSI had people ASKING THEM to take their money.

It really was very clever. Larry is no idiot. He is a professional, and this wasn’t his first time around the block. And he got millions. People asked CSI to take their money, and CSI took it. With no intention to ever trade it, or give it back. It was just an elaborate ponzi scheme, and the money moved overseas in to some fake Hong Kong company, where some dodgy accounting was done to hide the money.

All this stuff is known. It is all demonstratable. The investigation has been done. The evidence is in. And the police still don’t seem to care.

So Monday, option two is taken. The media.

If the police continually refuse to deal with this problem, then hopefully the media will be able to cause something to happen to force their hand. Because there is something wrong here. Is it possible that after years of drawing cartoons of politicians throughout the 80′s, Pickering became so close with enough influential politicians that he was able to guarantee his own safety throughout all of this scamming? There is proof online of Pickering being on the guest list of charity events populated with the rich, the famous and the political. He certainly knows his fair share of politicians and highly positioned beauracrats…

So anyway, the police ignored the year or more of complaints by people who had been scammed. People who had lost hundreds of thousands of dollars. The didn’t act on that. Then when Ken Gamble put together a comprehensive case against Pickering and CSI and handed that directly to them, they still didn’t do anything. That was something like 6 months ago now. How can the ‘justice’ system be so completely fucking useless at handling justice? Why are the victims of this elaborate and conniving scam still left without any sense of justice at all, while those who perpetrated it are free to live in complete luxury, spending the millions of dollars that they STOLE from the super funds and savings of thousands of Australians?

I just hope this news story really does finally force something to happen, because this has gone on for long enough.

For more information, you can also read:

• How Larry Pickering also controls OzRipOff, and they used that to slander their opponents.
• Ricky’s Mega Thread at ArbForum about CSI.
• Ken Gamble – World class Private Investigator
• Recent Pickering story which casually mentions how “He flogged dodgy betting systems and get-rich-quick stockmarket systems. “
• Avoid Sports Arbitrage Scams

So don’t forget buy the Daily Telegraph on Monday the 17th of October 2011, and watch A Current Affair on the same day (this is when they are meant to be published anyway – it should be obvious if they are or not).

• The story was also picked up by GoldCoast.com.au, and done even better than what the Telegraph did.
• Follow up post in the Daily Telegraph

read morePosted on: Sunday, October 16, 2011

RebelBetting Update

RebelBetting released this update about two weeks ago (I was in transit at the time!) So here it is now:

A new version of RebelBetting is released making it easier to get bookmaker bonuses and filter out the arbs you’re interested in.

Quick filters

We have placed some of the more common filters directly in the main window toolbar. Changing the minimum arb percentage can now be done quickly.

You can also select one specific bookmaker to be required, which is very useful when hunting for bonuses. You can also change the minimum odds required. If you want to have multiple required bookmakers, you can make these changes in the options as before.

More filters

• Hide arbs with two odds on the same bookmaker (does not apply to non-limiting books)
• Hide arbs with three outcomes

Faster arb delivery

We have improved the way we send arbs and increased the compression.
This means:

• Faster arb delivery
• About half the bandwidth used
• More arbs can now be sent!

To see a list of all updates in this release, please visit our changelog.

Number of arbs right now

By the way, right now RebelBetting is showing 1397 arbs. Or (as other arb services would display it) we have 16 423 arbs right now (with every possible bookmaker combination).

How is this possible? Well, when it says “Received x arbs” it actually says “Received x arb rows”. When expanding an arb row, you’ll see many more combinations of bookmakers that also produces arbs

The next version

We’ve already begun working on the next version of RebelBetting. Stay tuned!

read morePosted on: Sunday, October 9, 2011

Back to Work – Announcement to Follow

I have just arrived back home after a few months over in the UK and I am ready to get down to some serious work – which normally is completely inconsequential to you and your daily life, but I mention it now because I am very excited about a partnership I formed while in the UK, and a new product we are working to produce.

I don’t want to say too much at this stage, but hopefully I will be able to announce exactly what it is going to be about within the next two weeks, but my hope is that it will be something that many of you will be very eager to get your hands on, and it will have a profound affect on arbitrage trading.

So I am looking forward to telling you all about it! I can’t wait

read morePosted on: Saturday, October 8, 2011

SurebetMonitor Promotion for SAG Users Only

SurebetMonitor has just started a new promotion exclusive to Sports Arbitrage Guide readers – an extra 7 days added to your subscription when you use the code SAG when subscribing to their monthly (or longer) alert service. That’s right – 7 days added, for free.

So with their super low price of €49 for one month now extended to one month+7 days, what more incentive do you need to have a serious look at SurebetMonitor? Have a look for free on Mondays, then grab the SAG only special promotion and secure your extra 7 free days with your month or 3 month subscription.

Bonus Code: SAG

Reward: 7 Days Free 

Register Now

read morePosted on: Wednesday, October 5, 2011

Surebet Monitor enters commercial stage

Surebet Monitor has been commercially released.

The program’s features include:

• 30 supported bookmakers including Pinnacle Sports with hidden odds and limits, Betfair and many others.
• State of art detection technology offering amazing betting markets, including lay odds and 4-way arbitrages.
• User friendly client, providing smooth user experience together with dozens of personalization options and advanced alerting system.
• Very competitive pricing starting at 43 euros per month (if you decide for 3-months subscription).

Our Development Team has been very active and innovative in recent months and we expect to keep this up to give you an even better product.

If you have any concerns whether to invest your hard-earned money into Surebet Monitor you might wish to make use of our one week license, which is available just for 14 euros and allows you to cover the expense with bookie’s money. Try not to think how many surebets you will miss by not having the odds on your side.

Let bookies pay.

Yours,

Surebet Monitor Team

read morePosted on: Monday, July 18, 2011

The New Look Sports Arbitrage Guide

As any of our regular visitors will no doubt have noticed (very quickly), we have just undergone a HUGE overhaul of the look, navigation, and a couple of features of Sports Arbitrage Guide. Hopefully this will help make everything much easier to navigate, make updating the site easier and faster, and generally make everything better all round.

So there have already been a few small bugs which we have worked out, and probably more to be found as we work through the details of this swap over. One of the biggest changes to be sorted out though, is the fact that we have deleted the old forum, and started it again from scratch. It was going to be too much work to try to merge the old posts in to the new system, and the new system is a necessary improvement. ie: It is integrated with the rest of the site, so once you register with the forum, you should also be able to comment and make posts on the blog articles (and vice versa). This wasn’t possible with the old setup, and so I look forward to the continued improvement of interaction and usability of Sports Arbitrage Guide.

It may take a few days before I get all of the forum section recreated again, and get the posts all linked together properly though So give it a little bit!

Aegist.

read morePosted on: Monday, July 18, 2011

SCAM ALERT! – Please read

My contact at UCantLose.co.uk has just warned me that their name is currently being used to perpetrate a telephone scam.

The victim receives a phone call from someone claiming to be a representative of UCantLose.co.uk with a special offer. These offers seem to vary from selling systems to “let us trade your betfair account in return for just 50% of the profits”. Needless to say, if you act on the instructions of the scammer you will soon lose all your money and the representative disappears without a trace.

This scam is nothing to do with UCantLose.co.uk and appears to be someone (or even a team of people) cold calling numbers from the phonebook looking for victims.

UCantLose.co.uk have confirmed that they will NEVER call you with a sales pitch, will NEVER ask for your bank or card details over the phone or via email, will NEVER ask you to pay money into a bank account and will NEVER ask for the login details of any of your bookie accounts. If someone makes a sales call claiming to be associated with UCantLose.co.uk…it’s a scam!

If you have any concerns or question regarding this issue please click on the link below to contact UCantLose.co.uk directly.

http://www.ucantlose.co.uk/

read morePosted on: Thursday, June 9, 2011

Visitor Question about Data Feeds

Dear Aegist, firstly congrats on  publishing a truly informative arbitrage guide. well done.

My question is ,how do the arb services get their data.? Do they pay for a feed from each bookie?

cheers Baz

Hi Baz,
Before I get in to this, I should just make it clear that I am no expert on this subject, and I would love to get some comments on this from real programmers and people who know what they are talking about below. However, my dealings in this area and with various companies over the years have given me this basic level of knowledge…

My understanding about how alert services get their odds is from 3 main sources – I think the most common source of bookmaker odds for arbitrage alert services is the XML feed directly from the bookmakers who offer that service. This data is sometimes supplemented with a third party XML feed who provide odds which they have aggregated from numerous bookmakers, although I may have those two sources back to front – the third party might be primary, with supplementation from free bookmakers. Anyway, OddsMiner.com is one such example of a third company source of odds, and it is through companies like them that most of those odds comparison websites out there get their odds feeds. The third option is direct HTML ‘scraping’, which is where the alert service owner creates a bot to scan the bookmaker websites directly, much like Google does to index websites for their search engines, but instead of trying to store all of the data on the page, this bot is designed to just grab the odds for each market and store them in a useable form – and do it quickly, and often.

All three methods have the advantages and their problems.

Bookmaker Provided XML Feeds

Direct XML feeds from bookmakers are free, which is a huge advantage, and the bookmakers want you to use them. However, not all bookmakers offer them and those that do still control what sports and odds are covered in them, often providing only selected offerings – usually the most lucrative ones for them. The users have no say in what odds they can get, and as anyone who has ever used an alert service knows, sometimes the XML feed odds simply don’t match up with the odds on the website! So you have to accept that the free, bookmaker preferred system is not always the best data source for the users.

HTML Scraping of Odds

Direct HTML Scraping is much more reliable when it comes to the odds collected. Because the system takes the odds directly off the website and reports them asap, the odds are reliably what a user will find when they visit the website themselves. The creator of the html scraping program can also control what pages, and therefore, which sports and odds are scraped – so there are no restrictions to what odds can be collected. It is also free – ignoring the time/effort requirement to develop an adequate scraping program, and then maintain it with respect to the bookmaker website ie: If the bookmaker changes their website layout, the scraper needs to be updated to match the new layout.

For all of the benefits of HTML scraping though, it has the significant problem of requiring constant HTML access to the bookmaker website for re-scraping. In order to keep your scraped odds up to date, you need to scrape the whole website regularly – for arbitrage purposes, ideally you would scrape it every minute – but no website owner wants a bot hitting their website and loading every page on it every minute. That wastes their bandwidth, slows down the website for all of their users and costs them money. So any ip found repeatedly hitting a page at that frequency will usually be ip-blocked by the bookmaker. So you need to be much more clever with how you scrape the odds from bookmakers.

Third Party Odds Providers

Third party odds providers cost money. In return for that, you get a feed of odds of whatever sports, markets and bookmakers you want, without all of the other hassles. However, these data sources are still never perfect. I don’t know exactly how they get their odds, but I suspect it is a combination of bookmaker XML (probably in a closer partnership with the bookmakers, so they can get a better source and get more books than most common people), and possibly some html scraping used too. But I really don’t know. However they get their odds, the odds are still not perfect, but they are useable and mostly good enough. I think the biggest cost of using a third party odds provider, aside from the financial cost, is that you lose any unique advantage that you might be trying to claim. If everyone has the same source of odds, then every alert service is going to look very similar where it counts (what arbs it finds). Nonetheless, I think this is the most common source of odds because the simplicity of just letting someone else take care of it for you cannot be ignored.

Some more great information on this topic can be seen on OddsMiner’s FAQ page.

read morePosted on: Thursday, June 9, 2011

Questions About Bookies Banning Users

Dear aegist,

I am a mathematical statistician and a beginning arber from Slovakia and I carefully read a lot of forums and I consider you to be the best person to ask my questions, so I hope that you will find some time to answer them.

Basically the only thing that bothers me is the bookies banning accounts and how they do it.  I have 2 questions

1)      I would like to ask you if you know about any rules that the bookies use to determine arbers, especially betfair. Are they some statistical methods e.g. what percentage of the matches you bet are arbs? Or is it the total amount you bet on arbs that makes them ban you ?
2)      What is the worst thing that can happen to you if you get banned ? Is there a possibility that they will take your money and dont give in back ?

Thank you a lot for any information

Best regards,
Jozef H.

Hi Jozef,
Bookmakers don’t actually ban arbers. Not usually anyway. What happens is they restrict your betting limits down to amounts that are so small that it becomes worthless to keep betting with them. Some of them do it dramatically, so one day you will place able to place bets of over $5000, and then the next day you will be limited to $5. Some of them do it over several steps. Limiting you to $500 for a couple of weeks and then lowering it down to $5 when you continue to place ‘pro’ style bets. In any case, they don’t do anything to your account, they don’t confiscate money, and they don’t restrict your withdrawal options or anything else – they simply make you want to withdraw your money by not letting you bet it.

As for how they determine whether you are an arber or not, no one knows for certain unless they work in the bookmaker itself, but it seems most likely that the odds themselves will clearly give arbers away. Obviously when bookmakers set odds they think they are the best odds to set, but in retrospect it can sometimes be very obvious that a particular set of odds is out of line with the market – that is, the bookmaker may realise that they are offering too much value to the bettors. This sort of fluctuation of lines happens naturally all the time, and so sportsbooks are constantly revising their odds, looking for odds that are offering too much value, and adjusting them down back in line with the market.

In order to identify arbers, all they need to do is look at every account that placed a bet on those odds while the odds were offering high value. By tracking the accounts which place bets on high value odds in this way, it should be very easy to quickly identify which accounts are only placing bets on high value odds. By identifying those accounts, the sportsbook can then limit its risk at the hands of these ‘sharp’ accounts by simply limiting the bet volumes allowed to those accounts.

I think this is the primary method for identifying ‘risky accounts’. Other elements, such as exact figure bet amounts, $325.49 for example, would also identify arbers. As would placing bets over $5 – face it, how many people do you know who actually place bets more than about $20 bets on a regular basis? I don’t know any. Only arbers (or sharps in general) place hundreds of dollars every bet they place… And some bookmakers are scared of all sharps.

So that is, according to my best educated guess, how bookmakers identify arbers. That being said though, you mentioned Betfair – Betfair is not a bookmaker. It is a betting exchange. It does NOT care whether you are arbing or not, and will never try to identify arbers. They don’t make money through betting margins, they just take a straight commission off your winnings, so they want you to place as many bets as they can get from you. They also will never ‘limit’ you, because the bet limits are set by the other users who offer the bets. This is true of all betting exchanges. Pinnacle is the only other sportsbook who I have ever been able to confirm that they don’t limit arb traders. So you can feel safe doing arbitrage trading at betting exchanges and pinnacle – no fear of being limited.

See more on this topic here:

• If I am going to be limited anyway, why bother?

read morePosted on: Wednesday, June 8, 2011

RebelBetting – Most Popular Alert Service

Since RebelBetting first entered the Sports Arbitrage Scene around April 2009, it was clear to me from the beginning that this was going to be a serious company making a serious bit of software. They weren’t hiding behind crass marketing or exaggerating their successes like most of the rubbish that we are all forced to filter through on the internet. No, RebelBetting jumped right in to the dragons den of ArbForum, and said “Come try us out. Let us know what you think and we will try to improve.”

And improve is exactly what they did. They withstood the onslaught of criticism and negativity guaranteed to anyone offering arbitrage services in arbforum, where even if someone does actually like your service, they dare not admit it for fear of letting everyone else know that your service is good!

Having survived the first test of ArbForum – remaining resolute and resourceful in an atmosphere of extreme pessimism – it was interesting to then watch the guys at RebelBetting continue to build one of the most professional arbitrage companies that I have ever seen, and much much more importantly, the most respected alert service on the market, which I can now safely say, is easily the most popular alert service on the market too.

Through constant upgrades and improvements, with continual growth of features, sports and bookmakers, RebelBetting has managed to demonstrate to all of its customers that it is a reliable company which will continue to improve and guarantee the quality of their product. That knowledge, combined with the fact that their software simply works really well is why RebelBetting are the most popular alert service on the market.

Congratulations RebelBetting for all of the hard work, and I would like to award RebelBetting the brand new “Most Popular” badge, to be proudly worn on the alert services listing page.

Visit RebelBetting now and have a look at their first class software today.

read morePosted on: Tuesday, June 7, 2011