How to Spot a Betting Scam: Red Flags in Social Media Ads

Betting scams are flooding social media, preying on users with promises of impossible returns. If you recently scrolled past an advert claiming a guaranteed £1,470 win from a £70 bet, you are likely looking at a betting scam right now. In this article, we use real historical market data to dismantle these claims and show you exactly how to spot the red flags before you part with your money.

Types of scam

I am going to look at three different types of scam. This is not an exhaustive list but it covers the main areas. Firstly we are going to look at a website scam where you are required to sign up to a bogus website in order to consume the service. Next we are going to look at a couple of scams which require you to move to Telegram in order to take part. Finally we are going to look at an email scam from someone you may well be familiar with. I’ll leave you in suspense as to who this is until you get to that part of the article.

Each of these scams is different but the intended outcome remains the same. They all want you to part with your money for little or no return. Hopefully we can educate you how to spot these scams before you are tempted to fall for them.

The website betting scam

This advert came up whilst I was browsing Facebook. Sites that quote high win rates always make me curious. I never believe such bold claims so I had to visit to see what it was all about. Football score prediction makes this site sound like a correct score predictor but it isn’t. Instead it supposedly gives you 1X2 outcomes once you have signed up for a subscription. This website has a lot of red flags however.

We created a login to this site with the email address of a@a.com and a password of a. There was no validation on the email address or password strength. Any reputable site would not allow this to happen.

The next red flag is the subscription prices. $500 for a week right up to $18,000 for a year. Hopefully this alone would put people off signing up but people are desperate to make money. If they think they are going to be given tips where they can make big money, all rational thinking can go out of the window.

Another big red flag is the deposit methods. You can only deposit crypto-currency. Scammers love this as it is virtually untraceable once it leaves your digital wallet. Certain casinos use crypto as their main form of currency so unsuspecting victims may well see this as a valid deposit method. I can assure you it isn’t.

If you keep looking around the site, more issues will become apparent. It is a good idea to do this for any new financial site you visit. Scammers don’t like filling in sections that are irrelevant so you’ll most likely stumble across some incomplete sections of the website. The contact information for example is @FBT365COM. This of course is not a valid email address and is even worse than our a@a.com address used earlier.

The final red flags found on this site require certain technical know how. As an ex-scambaiter I immediately recognised the chat window on this site. It is by a company called tawk.to. If you see this on any website, be very cautious. Also, checking the domain records of this domain shows it has only been live for a very short time. I was able to establish this scam was running out of Hong Kong.

The Telegram betting scam

There are many different ways of scamming people using Telegram. It is a preferred medium for scammers of all types. We are going to investigate scams using fake results as the method to lure in unsuspecting victims

The AI fake results scam

I have seen many scam adverts appear on social media showing how AI was used to predict the correct score of a game. The most obvious red flag with these adverts was that every single game was a winner. Even with scores that were highly unlikely, the adverts were saying that they had predicted the outcome.

Looking at the advert, there are so many ways to spot that this is just one big scam. Firstly, the claim of winning £1,470 from a £70 bet. As the advert says, the score in this game as 1-0. That would mean that the odds of 1-0 must have been 20/1 (or 21 in decimal) for this to be correct. Using our own Market Data Viewer tool on the Betfair data, the highest these odds were in play was 7.6. Even pre match, the highest these odds ever reached was 10. There is no way these odds would have been double the betfair odds on any of the soft bookmakers so this can be seen as false information.

In another of the fake adverts, the scammer describes how they had a 96% success rate in the last 15 matches. A claim which most untrained and new bettors would see as being an attractive reason to sign up. There is a major flaw with this claim however. 96% of 15 is 14.4. This scammer has not even bothered to do the maths correctly. 14 wins out of 15 games would be a 93.3% success rate.

The final line of this advert should be the only one you need to read to realise this is a scam. I am not sure what Nolte kitchens have to do with betting and trading but I don’t really care about how impressive they are. I can only assume this scammer has used a template for his site from another scam, but has forgotten to change all of the information about it.

I was interested to see how this scammer ran his operations so I clicked through his links and ended up on the Telegram platform. This is a free part of his service where he posts his results. Interestingly, he never posts anything about the correct scores in the adverts. He just posts 2 leg correct score accas on lower league games. All of these typically win at odds of around 100. Occasionally he will have a loser. This allows him to increase his trust level by promising 3 months of free tips if he loses a bet.

We all know losing bets are part of betting and trading so to give away free access if a bet loses is nonsensical. To pay for his bets costs £149. I would almost guarantee that you won’t be seeing that money again and the bets you are given will lose.

I tried to get this scammer’s location but he was playing hard to get. Almost as if he had been caught out before. In the end I just came out and told him that if he really was in London as he claimed, he’d have no problem proving it. Of course, he went quiet at this point and refused to comply.

He wasn’t aggressive, he just wasn’t very good at scamming. He couldn’t produce his P/L data despite making claims of his success rate. He also wanted me to send him a screenshot when I had paid him, in cryptocurrency of course. This is a common tactic of scammers and this confirmed my beliefs of what he was and where he was located.

The fake website, league and results scam

This scam is very intricate. It uses a fake website, leagues that don’t exist and games that don’t exist. You would think that would be easy to spot wouldn’t you? Well if you know what you are looking for it is. Otherwise, you can be taken in very easily.

The screenshot we have from the Telegram feed shows a winning bet on the correct score market. This would be enough to convince gullible or new bettors to sign up. This bet turns 1000 Euros into 35,000 Euros. Who wouldn’t want to win that life-changing amount of money. Dig deeper though and the scam becomes more obvious.

Let’s start with the league, Italy Serie E. Have you ever heard of this? I know I haven’t. Flashscores and Sofascores don’t cover it. I Googled the teams and found that they have no fixtures currently showing. As a final check, I got AI to tell me about the Italian Serie E league. The response is below:-

There is no official league called “Serie E” in Italian football.

If you have heard the term, it is likely due to one of two common misunderstandings:

1. Confusion with “Serie D, Girone E”: The fourth tier (Serie D) is divided into 9 regional groups. In Italian, these groups are called Gironi. Therefore, “Serie D, Girone E” (Group E) exists, but it is just one subsection of Serie D, not a separate league below it

So the league that you are being told to back is bogus. But if that is the case, how can you place your bets? The answer is simple. Use the link that the scammer gives you through to their website. This looks legitimate in the first view and even allows you to bet on real games. Good luck getting any winnings though. If you follow the link through, you can even view “live” footage of this non-existent game in a non-existent league. They really have gone the extra mile to try and scam you. In fact, as I am writing this, today’s Serie E game involves the team, VillaFranca, a team from Spain! One more inconsistency is the time of the congratulations post. The game “kicked off” at 6.30 as per the bet slip part of the screenshot. The congratulations post was made at 8.12 when the game would not have finished. This is a major flaw in the scam, but one that would go unnoticed unless you were actually looking for it, as I am.

I’ve not been able to interact with this scammer as they don’t allow chat on their Telegram channel. The sole aim is to direct you to their website where they can collect card information any other personal details.

The website the Telegram feed takes you to was created in April 2025. I am actually surprised it has lasted 6 months. It is obviously working for the scammer which is bad news.

The email betting scam

Email scams have been around for decades. They are nice and easy to perform as you build up the trust of your victim, typically through a sustained campaign of sending multiple emails, requiring them to act quickly. In this scam we come across a name that is probably already familiar to you.

XG Football started posting sponsored ads on Instagram recently. It sounded interesting what they were talking about so I decided to investigate further. Clicking the link took me through to a page that seemed vaguely familiar. It gave me a full description of what the course involved and more crucially, a place where I could enter my email address to receive the free e-book. Of course I signed up with a burner email address.

The email duly arrived and guess who it was from. The one and only Ben Michaels, the made up front man from Sports Trading Life. This was even from his STL email, not a mention of Soccerfy, the website we had come through, or XG Goals. In fact, several other accounts have also been directing users to this landing page, namely soccerfy_tips and statto_ai.

I decided to do some more digging on Soccerfy with the help of Gemini. It appears they are an American company with an address in Miami, Florida. Their website soccerfy.com allows you to join the mailing list which I duly did. This prompted an email from “Steve” whose business address was Mayfair in London. A quick Google shows no sign of Soccerfy, or in fact, any business at that address other than commercial concerns. How can Soccerfy have an address in the USA yet Ben and Steve both have UK business addresses. It is simple, for the scam to work, people need to be convinced they are dealing with people in their locality. Both Steve and Ben used the same email styles. Emboldening key words and using emojis throughout the text. Was I dealing with the same person? I believe I was.

I have emailed Steve to say I was concerned I was getting emails from Ben who is using a different company to Soccerfy, despite providing my details via a Soccerfy link. Unsurprisingly, I’ve not had a response. Gemini did discover a 2021 article which it provides the name of a person who it believes is behind the STL scam, and also a name of the Soccerfy guru who it believes is behind the entire scam. I will refrain from naming these as it is not proven.

Needless to say, since we sent STL underground, he is still operating under various guises and in fact, the entire operation may not even be UK based. It is so easy to pay actors to do your voiceovers these days. It is possible that a US company are behind the operation but employing UK actors to front the scams.

I’m still looking into this scam. We know the endgame is to get people to purchase unnecessary and expensive software or courses. We’ve shown how that part of the scam works.

What is unclear is who is behind the scam. I feel that with the Soccerfy/STL link, the answers are becoming more clearer. As I have said, I am not going to provide unproven names on here but there is nothing to stop you asking AI about the link between the two entities. It may provide the same names or it may not.

To conclude

I apologise that this is a long post but it is important in order to keep everyone safe. There are a lot more similar scams visible on all social media platforms every single day. Always use common sense, never sign up for anything without doing further investigation. As an ex scambaiter, I am comfortable conversing with these people and digging deeper into their charade. Never compromise your own safety and never sign up with your real details if you believe it to be a scam.