These days there are so many betting tipsters around, some good but the majority are very bad and will almost certainly lose you money. At Top Football Tipster we pride ourselves on the level of research carried out before any football betting tips are selected, as well as having one of the best value tipster services around. However before choosing a tipster service, it's always good to have a look around at other services, just as you would when selecting a car insurance provider.
This guide will take you through the pitfalls of choosing certain tipster services, which can easily hook you in with incredible promises. Some will outright lie, others will hide the truth, and some will even carry out very clever scams to get some money from you.
So to help you avoid being caught out, here are 10 of our most important tips to be aware of when considering joining any tipster service.
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Tip 1: Avoid Social media tipsters
There are so many reasons why social media tipsters should be avoided; it's probably even possible to write an entire article on just this first tip alone. It's like someone claiming to sell genuine Rolex watches on a market stall, would you really trust the watches are genuine?
Social media is a useful platform to market a website, but if used as your main platform for tipping, it's can rarely be trusted. Any tip can be deleted at the click of a button if not successful, any comment can be deleted or user blocked if they sense something's not right. It's even possible to backdate a tip so that it looks like it was selected before the game but actually the result was already known. These are all techniques used to gain followers before they realise how bad the tipster really is. Then once established, and a good following has been gained, if things don't go well with the genuine tips and a bad reputation builds, they can simply start a new page with the same manipulative techniques.
The reason they try so hard to gain a following is because they will promote clicking on a particular website link in each post. The link will be the same each time and they will say something like "sign up here to get involved", with a big arrow pointing to a website link. That link is an affiliate link and the key to their income, if you click on that link and then sign up to the bookie they direct you to, they will get a % of your betting losses for life. So in effect, they get paid when you lose!
One last thing on social media tipsters, if you see them celebrate with a "BOOM!!!!" after a tip of 1.20 odds comes in, run a mile!
Tip 2: Avoid Free Betting Tips Sites
Now having tips that are free sounds great right? Wrong. Almost anything that comes for free in life you should be wary of and questioning, and that doesn't stop at tipping. Ask yourself why is the tipster offering their bets for free? What are they going to gain?
It's not the first time we've mentioned it but it's all about affiliate links to different bookmakers, and the problem here is what we touched on at the beginning of the article. If these tipsters are only in it for the links, the truth is almost certainly that the tips wont be good enough to make any consistent profit, and that is why you wont find free tips websites with a history of bets, with their odds and outcome, because they don't want the user to see their tips lose you money. Their only concern is that their links are clicked, as the bookmaker will actually pay the 'tipster' a % of your betting losses for life. Unlike a subscription tipster, who needs to win as much as possible to keep paying customers, free tipsters actually benefit when you lose as that's how they generate their income, how awful does that sound?
Tip 3: Can Tipster Proofing be Trusted?
This is a very sneaky trick that can even be used by some of the biggest tipster networks who come across at first glance as very open and transparent, and most wont even suspect a thing. For those of you who don't know, a tipster network site is a big website that provides access to numerous tipsters, each with their own subscription fee.
With tipster network sites, they often advertise positions for new tipsters, but before you can become a tipster on their site you must pass a proofing period to apparently make sure you're good enough to be on their site. However, really this proofing period is more to make sure you will reliably post tips to the website on a regular basis. The clever part about this is it comes across like they are being very conscientious by vetting any potential tipsters.
The problem is they use this proofing period to market the service once it's open to the public, however the tips aren't available to the public during the time of the proofing period, therefore there is no way of knowing if the trial results are genuine. What makes this process all the more suspicious is that very often the results during their proofing period are utterly incredible, with a huge return on investment every month, but as soon as the tipsters tips become available to the public for a pretty hefty fee of around £30-40 a month, they no longer make any profit. Yet all the marketing material for that tipster, like ROI and amount won from £10 stakes always includes their amazing proofing period where the results could be entirely fabricated.
The final step of this process is that once the tipster's publicly available results (after the proofing period) have got so bad that they look like a bad tipster even despite their amazing proofing period, the tipster network will simply remove the tipster from their site and start a new tipster service with the same suspicious strategy as before.
So if you see a tipster being promoted on a tipster network who has amazing proofing period results, IGNORE THEM!! Focus only on how well they have done since their tips became available to the public, and if they can't match the proofing period then you'll know something is wrong.
Tip 4: Can Reviews be Trusted?
Now this is another which most wont be aware of, but some tipster review sites can't be trusted, even if they claim to be honest. It's frustrating because you might think you're doing the right thing by searching for a tipster on a review site to see how good they are. However, what if the tipster site is paying the reviewer?
Sometimes you have to ask the question, "how does this website earn money?" especially if you don't see much in the way of advertising, and that's when the review is actually the advert.
You may see an amazing review of a tipster, or even a review where the results have been poor but the reviewer has somehow managed to put a positive spin on it, but there is one thing you need to check before you can really trust it. There is usually a link to the tipster website being reviewed, if it links to the standard website address, then all is fine. However, if the link looks a bit strange, has a long number in it, or some random letters for example, then it's likely an affiliate link and the reviewer will be getting a cut of your monthly fee to that tipster if you sign up after clicking the link.
Therefore it's in the reviewer's interest to make the review look and sound as good as possible to secure as many to sign ups as possible through the affiliate link. If every other word has amazing, fantastic, and "sign up here", keep on running.
Tip 5: Where's the Results History?
A genuine tipster like any skill forms their trust through hard work, research and evidence. So you think you have found a good tipster, they have high percentage win rates, or at least claim to have. So let's see dated history. Let's see information on the past bets, the date, the selections, the odds (individual odds if more than one selection in a bet), the match result, and the bet outcome. These are the key factors needed to calculate any win rate and any return on investment (ROI) for your chosen staking amount. If these key criteria are missing, then how can you trust the tipster?
They might claim to have an amazing ROI or win %, but if you don't have the necessary data to calculate it for yourself then their claims can't be trusted. A good tipster should be able to provide you with vast information that reads like a bank statement. Some of the very best tipsters have been tipping for years. They can't always win of course but they can show a back dated history maybe even along with why they chose that selection.
Unfortunately there is nothing to prevent tipsters producing a fake history or removing some of their losses from the history. So always be suspicious if the results history looks too good.
Tip 6: Results too Good to be True
As already touched on in Tip 5, you won't be able to believe your eyes at some of the websites you come across when betting on football. They look slick, flashy and colourful. The real draw is seeing how nearly all bets have won over the past 12 months, or how they claim to have a ROI of over 30% every year. Now here's the bad news; it's fake! The simple aim is to get you to part with your cash.
There is usually one reason a site will create a fake results history, and that's to secure a large payment. There would be no point asking people for a small monthly fee as before the month had finished the user would realise that the results didn't match the tips being posted and leave without ever contemplating returning. They would probably also warn all their friends about the site, so the website needs to secure as many big one off payments as possible before their bad reputation leads to no new customers. The way they do this is by only offering long term memberships, either a years membership or a lifetime membership, but there certainly wont be any option to trial the website, or have any short term membership at a reasonable price, or any money back offers.
So if you see amazing results but only long term membership options or high priced monthly memberships available, avoid!
Tip 7: Avoid High Volume Tipping
Another telltale sign that you need to run away as fast as Usain Bolt is high volume tipping. It often happens with in-play social media tipsters; as soon as one bet finishes they will almost straight away post another tip, and all because of one very simple objective, link clicking. These are sites that are placing literally hundreds of tips a month, on anything and everything. Or it could be hundreds of bets on football matches only. Whilst, in theory, it would be possible to do this, you wouldn't be getting much sleep and heed the old saying 'too many trips to the well'…. it's just a con and the real truth is that these tips will have little to no research and value behind them. That's because their purpose is to be used as a way to get you to click on their affiliate links. The more tips that are posted, the more links can be posted too, and therefore the greater chance they have that you will click on a link and they will make their money from it. Too many tips equals too many links, which equals too many losses.
Tip 8: Is the Service Professional?
Joining up to a tipster service is just like buying something in a shop. You need to look for a key component: customer service. Customer service from a tipster website will almost always be by email but messages can still come across as 'I really care' or 'I couldn't care at all', or even not come across at all. A genuine good tipster has nothing to hide and that is why they will be happy to answer any questions and queries with detailed, honest replies, and usually they wont take too long to get back to you.
A dodgy tipster will evade questions, which may make them look bad, and sometimes just not even bother to answer. So if they can't even put the effort in to reply to an email, then it makes sense they probably don't put much effort in to researching their tips either. Also, if communication is bad, you'll certainly struggle to get your money back if you're not happy with the service.
We would advise anyone thinking of joining a tipster site to email them a question first, see what kind of response comes back, if at all, and let that help you decide whether to join. Worst case scenario, if they don't even have a means to contact them, just don't waste your money.
All good services offer incentives, something that gives the customer a taste of what they will be getting but without needing to commit, a tipster service should be no different.
A good tipster service should be prepared to give a reduced initial month, or even better the option of a no fuss refund for a certain period of time if you're not happy with the service. The absolute minimum they should be offering is 7 days with the option of a full refund, as at least it's long enough to get a good feel for the service even if it's not long enough to assess consistency of the tipster.
This is standard good customer service and you shouldn't accept anything less. It's also a sign that a website is more trustworthy, which can go a long way these days. If there is no refund available or no trial period, then the website clearly has no faith in the quality of their tipster service.
Tip 10: Avoid Match-fixing Claims
A lot of tipster's claiming to have information of match fixing are found on social media, once again another reason to avoid social media tipsters. These particular tipsters however are outright scammers.
They will claim inside information and post plenty of winning tips at very long odds which looks very impressive, probably even containing a few complimentary comments, written by alternative accounts they own of course. These posts must not be trusted, for reasons already explained in Tip 1.
What they will then do to gain your trust is offer the first tip for free if you send them a private message, and this is where the clever part comes in. They will often tip HT/FT bets, as the odds can be fairly long, however they will give a different random tip to each person, none of which are fixed of course. The majority will lose, and they will block those users from being able to comment on their social media posts. However they know if you give enough tips to different people, at least one is likely to win, and that person now believes they genuinely have fixed match information and is then willing to pay a large amount of money for the next tip, believing it's fixed even though it was just random chance.
If a match were truly fixed, someone with inside information would make much more money using the information they have, so why tell you? The more people that bet on a fixed match the more the odds shorten, the more suspicion it raises, the more UEFA get involved and the more chance that your so called winning bet will be investigated and voided. Bottom line, if someone is sharing fixed information to a stranger then the match isn't fixed, the word is being brought in to hook YOU in and take YOUR money.
Summary
There are some very good and genuine tipsters around, but unfortunately far more 'sharks' exist, although it is like this in every day life in most businesses. Genuine tipsters need to promote themselves, like a good resume but at the same time over promoting is just suspicious. If the results look too good, they usually are, if there is detail lacking, they are usually hiding something. Try to look beyond the marketing bluff, and if you're left with too many questions or doubts, avoid them.
Genuine tipsters won't boast a great deal because they know being honest with potential customers goes much further in the long term, and making any level of consistent profit is not easy. Remember betting is not a sprint its a marathon, and a consistent and steady return is very rewarding. Like everything in life, consider, consider more, and then consider again. Don't be fooled, and support genuine tipping sites.
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