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Scam Handicappers ------ A curse to this business! aka Scamdicappers!
The sports handicapping industry is non-regulated. To sell picks on sporting events, you only need to have customers who will buy them. You don't have to know squat about handicapping or even really that much about the sport. Anybody can advertise, make phone calls, and/or start a website claiming whatever they want. Anything goes in this business as it is a very, very rare day that any law enforcement or governmanet agency or will do anything to regulate you, stop you, or punish you.
We would love to receive any contributions of dishonest handicappers, personal stories you have about any contact with ripoff sports services, etc.
HIGH PRESSURE TACTICS from Handicapping Services
This is what really ticks us off more than anything. If you ever have called for a free pick from an ad or email, usually you will get a recording asking you to leave your phone number for a callback or a salesman who says he is on the other line and will call you right back if you would just give him your number. If you do talk with somebody, if you hear a number of other voices in the background, you have gotten hold of a boiler room. This is a group of salesmen in a room using deceit, outright lies, fake claims, insults, and anything they can think of to get you to wire them money right now!
A real life example: OTL Sports calls us up. They say we can buy their Investment Club for $699 for a season of NBA basketball. The salesman, Mike, says it would be another $699 for the NCAA. He bragged about their great record in the NBA. I asked where they were monitored. He said at Vegas Insider, which was true, but the record was not what he claimed.
Mike proceeded to brag about his "Lock Club". It was hitting at over 70% the last three years. I asked where it was monitored. He said it wasn't because they didn't want other people to know what teams they were playing. Well, what Mike didn't realize is that one of the most respected monitors, The Sports Monitor of Oklahoma City, does not release what anybody's picks are. It only posts results. Any pro handicapper knows this. In other words, Mike is full of sh*t.
Mike also bragged how OTL Sports had "inside information" from every team in the NFL and also all over the country. He said they talk with Joe Lupo, the Sports Director at the Stardust in Las Vegas, every week. Mike didn't realize, but Joe Lupo has not worked at the Stardust since October of 2002!
I later have a guy, John N., call me and say he is one of the owners of OTL Sports. He is not as high pressure, but he does call and leaves me a voice message saying that "I need to be a man" and call him back. When questioned about why they are using Joe Lupo's name, he says they don't want to use the real names of the inside information people. They are "best friends" of the trainer of the Oakland Raiders. He gives them who is really hurt. "They know people all over the country that they talk to every day."
Sorry, but these guys are full of it. The handicappers behind the service might be trying their best, but they have scum selling their service. And, they lie about how much they charge for the service. They are just as bad as the services that have long been put out of business.
I have heard from many people discussing their experiences with scam services. In all fairness, many times customers are just ticked off they received some losing plays with a service. Therefore, they call the service a scam. That's not necessarily true, ANY handicapper or service can have a losing day, week, or even a month or longer. It is called gambling!
The following are excerpt from emails I have received:
OTL Sports:
"OTL Sports"... These guys are definitely your typical boiler room. And I too have talked with that lying thief JOHN... the so-called sales manager or part owner or whatever. You can't get a straight answer out of any of those guys. Their 'Lock Club', well let's just say it's a little vague. I am unfortunately a current client of OTL. I didn't realize what they were until the lies started piling up. I was first told by JOHN that he would give me first time deal for the March Madness lock club of $800. I called back to talk some more and the next guy offered it to me for $1700. After negotiating $400 and them promising to be 75% by the sweet 16 I paid them. After a winning day today I am just now out of the red by $35. After reading your column I am going to cut my losses and quit playing them. The funny thing is...the last few days I have called back and talked with several people there, telling them who I am and that I was calling in for the Lock club selections that I paid for. Guess what? Ever single person that I talked with had a DIFFERENT set of 'Lock Club Plays'. You should have heard John try to back his way out of that one when I confronted him. He basically hung up on me when I asked him how all of his guys have different picks. Pretty big Lock Club huh? The final straw for me was when I called them and confronted them with the fact that I was sent a flyer in the mail saying that they were offering a 'Lock Club' special for all of March Madness for only $199. That's a little different from the $1700 the one guy wanted, huh? When I asked for my $200 back...well, you can guess. They said the more money the client pays the better the picks get! I guess they have about 10 levels of lock club plays.
Thank you, James, for putting together a website for scamcappers. You have saved me the trouble. These guys do more damage than a thief in the night and need to be exposed.
Below is an article detailing a couple of scam operations and the lawsuit and judgment that came down against them.
Man settles with sports handicappers
Player says he lost nearly $2.3 million in dealings
By MIKE HOYEM
Published by news-press.com on December 27, 2003
A California man has settled a lawsuit he filed against a Fort Myers-based sports handicapping business he says scammed him out of more than $2 million.
But Timothy Edwin Bronkhurst, 49, of Carlsbad said Friday the settlement he agreed to about 10 days ago doesn't compensate him for anywhere near the $2.3 million he lost in his dealings with Player's Edge Inc. and National Sports Consultants Inc.
"I lost millions with these guys," Bronkhurst said. "Thank God I'm almost 50 years old and had a lot of money still. I'm glad we collected what we did."
According to the suit, which was filed Nov. 25 in U.S. District Court in Fort Myers, Bronkhurst got involved with a pair of companies that advertised nationally they could guarantee big profits for gamblers because they had "inside information" on sporting events.
The suit claimed the companies actually are "scamdicappers" instead of handicappers and use high-pressure sales techniques to squeeze money out of those who call their toll-free phone numbers.
The suit said Player's Edge operated from about December 1994 until May 2003, when it was sold to National Sports Consultants.
Both businesses, according to the suit, operated in essentially the same manner by luring gamblers with national radio advertisements that promise earnings so quickly that the money spent is more of an investment than a gamble.
"This is about getting inside information,? the ads say. "We have contacts everywhere."
According to the suit, the companies make their money by charging "package fees" for inside information and allegedly by getting kickbacks from the offshore sports bookies that take the bets. The suit said Player's Edge was run by John J. Rodney Jr., who used the names "Brian Edwards" and "Dan "The Man" Wilson" in radio ads.
Rodney, the suit alleged, sold his interest in Player's Edge in May to National Sports Consultants' owner Robert Robitzek, who calls himself "Mike Gibson" in radio spots.
Also named as defendants were a dozen other people who own at least 11 other corporations allegedly tied to the operation.
According to state Division of Corporations records, Player's Edge and National Sports Consultants list their addresses as a pair of strip malls in south Fort Myers: the Island Park Shopping Center at 16520 S. Tamiami Trail and the Summerlin Crossings shopping center at 15880 Summerlin Road.
The News-Press tried contacting National Sports Consultants on Friday by calling the company's 1-800 number.
At first, a man who said he was Mike Gibson answered and said he would give no details on the settlement.
"Why should I?" he asked.
A subsequent call was answered by a man who said his name was Jimmy Rogers.
'We have nothing to say about that," he said of the settlement. "No comment."
The suit claimed the companies have had more than 7,000 "customers/victims" since 2000 who initially are given free tips.
The handicappers, according to the suit, don't have any inside track on betting and instead "simply take their best guesses" based on public information.
According to the suit, Bronkhurst sold a business in 1998 and was looking for ways to invest his money when the stock market took a downturn.
After hearing the radio ads and visiting the Player's Edge Web site, Bronkhurst was impressed and decided to invest.
Bronkhurst started with $100,000, the suit said, and soon was depositing $55,000 to $900,000 at a time into the Player's Edge bank account.
The wagers listed in the suit said Bronkhurst placed 76 bets from Feb. 26 to May 17 and lost 56 times.
Bronkhurst said the vast majority of the money he lost was for inside information as opposed to actual bets.
"They really nailed me to the wall, these guys," Bronkhurst said.
"It's a lesson I'll take with me to the grave."
__________________________________________________ ______________________ We have heard the National Sports Consultants radio show many times on Saturday mornings. They are somewhat convincing. They promise to make you $35,000 in one week! They talk down to their listeners basically saying you are an idiot not to "invest" your money with them. Like most sports services, they only talk about their victories, never their losses. __________________________________________________ ______________________
ANOTHER ARTICLE
Man spends $20 to $40 Thousand Dollars on picks in one year!
Desperate to Recoup Gambling Losses, Ohio Man Ends Up in a New York Jail Cell
By PATRICK HEALY
New York Times
Published: January 28, 2004
APHANK, N.Y., Jan. 27 - At 57, Douglas Warner was out of work, depressed and had lost everything betting on football. Before that, he had flopped playing the stock market, and the bills were piling up. He was a Willy Loman of the post-dot-com age.
But Mr. Warner had a plan to set his life straight, his fiancée and the Suffolk County Police said on Tuesday. He would kidnap the owner of a Long Island company that had given him sports betting advice and demand that the $200,000 he had lost be returned. So last week, the police said, Mr. Warner packed a handgun, stun gun and bullet-resistant vest into his fiancée's Buick and drove from his Ohio home to New York to get his money back.
Mr. Warner's trip ended in a jail cell after an unsuccessful attempt to extort the $200,000 from Platinum Sports Advisory, the Oakdale sports betting firm he had relied on for tips. But not before Mr. Warner had enacted his own forlorn, wintertime version of "Dog Day Afternoon," the cinematic tale of a robbery gone awry.
"I just can't believe he's done this," said his fiancée, Gilda Davis, who shared a home with Mr. Warner in Springboro, Ohio, near Cincinnati. "He's been acting kind of high-strung and temperamental with me. We didn't even talk."
Mr. Warner had been traveling back and forth to Las Vegas to gamble, and when he took off last week in her car, Ms. Davis said, she assumed he had set off on another routine trip to try to regain his losses.
After arriving in New York on Thursday, Mr. Warner parked himself outside Platinum Sports Advisory and watched its employees come and go, Suffolk County Police Detective Lieutenant Edward Reilly said in a news conference on Tuesday. Mr. Warner had had heated phone conversations with the firm's executives that he meticulously tape-recorded and documented, Ms. Davis said.
On Sunday, Mr. Warner followed one of the firm's executives out of the parking lot and onto the road, but soon lost him in the Long Island traffic, the police said. He drove back to the company and waited until its owner, George Villano, 47, walked out, then grabbed him at gunpoint.
They drove to Mr. Villano's home nearby, and Mr. Villano persuaded Mr. Warner to accept $4,800 in cash as a down payment. Mr. Villano dropped Mr. Warner off at the Sayville Motor Lodge, promising that the two would meet again the next morning, when Mr. Villano would give Mr. Warner the rest of the $200,000.
Mr. Villano called the police.
At 10 a.m. Monday, Mr. Warner returned to Platinum Sports, wearing a blue bulletproof vest and carrying a stun gun. He left his loaded pistol in the Buick. When officers approached him, he pulled out the stun gun and tried to fight them off, the police said. It took five officers to subdue him.
Mr. Warner will be arraigned on Wednesday at First District Court in Central Islip on a litany of charges including kidnapping, robbery and attempted grand larceny, the police said. When his fiancée reached him by telephone, he told her not to hire a lawyer, that he would rather rot, Ms. Davis said.
She said she had been up for hours listening to Mr. Warner's taped conversations and poring over his financial records to figure out how the middle-aged, middle-class guy she had been with for 11 years decided to salvage his life in such a hapless, desperate fashion.
It began two years ago, when he lost his job with a marketing firm after having worked there for 15 years. He was a college graduate who had played football on scholarship, Ms. Davis said.
Mr. Warner tried to play the stock market, but he lost even more money, Ms. Davis said. Then, last fall, Mr. Warner heard about the legal gambling advice Platinum Sports offered for a fee, and he dived in.
Ms. Davis said he began flying to Las Vegas every week to gamble and often spent three days there and four at home. He was secretive, but Ms. Davis said that the phone rang often when he was home and that he often sent large sums of cash to New York.
Investigators said Mr. Warner had paid $20,000 to $40,000 to Platinum. The police and Suffolk County's Consumer Affairs Department said there had been no prior complaints or charges filed against the company.
Mr. Warner mentioned that the owners of Platinum were going to cut him into their business, Ms. Davis said, but there was no sign he was doing anything but losing.
"He lost everything he had," said Ms. Davis, who blames Platinum for her fiancé's woes. "They took it all. He's got about $6,000 sitting in a little piddly checking account, and the bills are atrocious. He's got nothing."
ANOTHER ARTICLE!
HANDICAPPERS BUSTED IN FLORIDA!
Book Thrown at Florida Handicappers
By Stephen Nover, Covers .com
Operating a sports handicapping service in the United States is perfectly legal, but better be smart about it.
That advice comes courtesy of Joseph Kelly, an American gaming lawyer and co-editor of the Gaming Law Review.
"Nothing for a handicapper to worry about unless he does something stupid," Kelly said during the recent BoDog Handicapping Conference in Las Vegas.
Unfortunately there are plenty of stupid, greedy touts preying on ignorant people, some suffering from a gambling addiction.
Eyebrows were raised in the sports gaming industry when 14 men involved with a sports service in Fort Myers, Fla., were arrested last month. One already has pled guilty. He faces a maximum of two years in prison and up to a $250,000 fine.
If the government, be it state or federal, starts arresting people for selling their sports opinion then things have reached an all-time low. However, in this case, far more is involved. Fraud is the key word, says Kelly. If there are allegations of fraud, law enforcement could get involved.
Asking a potential customer to pay $15,000 for inside information on a game is fraud, Kelly said. Enforcement agencies should crack down on scammers and unscrupulous marketing people claiming to be handicappers, who lie about their records, promise inside information, run boiler room operations and hassle people on the phone.
These Florida guys were drawing customers by telephone solicitation, running two websites and having a radio talk show. They referred their customers to certain offshore Internet books. These books then allegedly provided the Florida sports service access to their clients' betting information and account balances.
Reportedly the sports service guys earned referral fees if their customers bet with these books. So they were acting as agents.
"If you start accepting a part of the profits then you're getting into a dark shade of gray," Kelly said.
This comes from Kelly, acknowledged as one of the few experts in gaming law. So it's hard to define exactly what is legal and what isn't in the murky world of online sports gaming.
Where a sports service can find legal trouble is if it shares with the bookmaker any profit made from the clients it recommends to them. Not only is this unethical, law enforcement sees the handicapping service being part of illegal bookmaking. They then can prosecute them under the Wire Act.
I don't shed any tears when scammers like the Florida bunch get nailed. The handicapping industry unfortunately is polluted with fakes and bad guys. They make it tough for the legitimate ones.
So this prosecution is good. The government is saying if you're operating in such a sleazy, rip-off manner we're going to search for things to come after you.
Hyping things in an unrealistic and high-profile manner is a red flag to government. Tout services operating this way better not be hiding anything, because the government is going to search every nook and cranny to find something. Chances are they will.
SCAM MONITORING SERVICE!
Nevada Sports Monitor is being run by a group of scam artists that put themselves at the top of the list. They are doing such a poor job that it is humorous. These people include jrtips.com, charliessports.com, and usacappers.com. These guys tell lies, create fake handicappers, and only want your money. Someday they will be prosecuted and put in jail. Similar scam artists include nsawins.com and vegassi.com. They are con artists.
National Sports Consultants Scams Hockey Star
ESPN.com news services
Flyers star Jeremy Roenick gambled on sports, though he did nothing illegal and nothing against NHL rules, but says he stopped after Philadelphia general manager Bob Clarke warned him about betting.
"I enjoyed it, but I don't think I had a problem," Roenick told the Philadelphia Inquirer. "I shut it off cold turkey."
The FBI came across Roenick's name, according to a story Sunday in the Inquirer, in April during an investigation of National Sports Consultants, a gambling tout service in Fort Myers, Fla.
Investigators dropped their inquiry into Roenick's actions after concluding that he did not bet on the Flyers -- or any other hockey team -- and was not involved in any illegal activity, according to the Inquirer. The NHL does not prohibit legal gambling on sports other than hockey.
A law official said that Roenick paid the handicapping firm more than $100,000, but he told the Inquirer that it was far less than that and that his total bets were somewhere between $50,000 and $100,000.
The story does not make clear where Roenick placed his bets. National Sports Consultants has been accused of claiming falsely to have inside information on games and of taking kickbacks for referring bettors to offshore Internet casinos.
Roenick said he never talked hockey to the touts, who give tips for a fee but do not handle bets. Roenick's betting interests ran to football and basketball, according to the Inquirer.
Although Roenick said he stopped gambling after Clarke's warning in January, two touts told the Inquirer that Roenick bet into the spring. Eleven handicappers from the firm have pleaded guilty to federal gambling chargers.
The sports handicapping industry is non-regulated. To sell picks on sporting events, you only need to have customers who will buy them. You don't have to know squat about handicapping or even really that much about the sport. Anybody can advertise, make phone calls, and/or start a website claiming whatever they want. Anything goes in this business as it is a very, very rare day that any law enforcement or governmanet agency or will do anything to regulate you, stop you, or punish you.
We would love to receive any contributions of dishonest handicappers, personal stories you have about any contact with ripoff sports services, etc.
HIGH PRESSURE TACTICS from Handicapping Services
This is what really ticks us off more than anything. If you ever have called for a free pick from an ad or email, usually you will get a recording asking you to leave your phone number for a callback or a salesman who says he is on the other line and will call you right back if you would just give him your number. If you do talk with somebody, if you hear a number of other voices in the background, you have gotten hold of a boiler room. This is a group of salesmen in a room using deceit, outright lies, fake claims, insults, and anything they can think of to get you to wire them money right now!
A real life example: OTL Sports calls us up. They say we can buy their Investment Club for $699 for a season of NBA basketball. The salesman, Mike, says it would be another $699 for the NCAA. He bragged about their great record in the NBA. I asked where they were monitored. He said at Vegas Insider, which was true, but the record was not what he claimed.
Mike proceeded to brag about his "Lock Club". It was hitting at over 70% the last three years. I asked where it was monitored. He said it wasn't because they didn't want other people to know what teams they were playing. Well, what Mike didn't realize is that one of the most respected monitors, The Sports Monitor of Oklahoma City, does not release what anybody's picks are. It only posts results. Any pro handicapper knows this. In other words, Mike is full of sh*t.
Mike also bragged how OTL Sports had "inside information" from every team in the NFL and also all over the country. He said they talk with Joe Lupo, the Sports Director at the Stardust in Las Vegas, every week. Mike didn't realize, but Joe Lupo has not worked at the Stardust since October of 2002!
I later have a guy, John N., call me and say he is one of the owners of OTL Sports. He is not as high pressure, but he does call and leaves me a voice message saying that "I need to be a man" and call him back. When questioned about why they are using Joe Lupo's name, he says they don't want to use the real names of the inside information people. They are "best friends" of the trainer of the Oakland Raiders. He gives them who is really hurt. "They know people all over the country that they talk to every day."
Sorry, but these guys are full of it. The handicappers behind the service might be trying their best, but they have scum selling their service. And, they lie about how much they charge for the service. They are just as bad as the services that have long been put out of business.
I have heard from many people discussing their experiences with scam services. In all fairness, many times customers are just ticked off they received some losing plays with a service. Therefore, they call the service a scam. That's not necessarily true, ANY handicapper or service can have a losing day, week, or even a month or longer. It is called gambling!
The following are excerpt from emails I have received:
OTL Sports:
"OTL Sports"... These guys are definitely your typical boiler room. And I too have talked with that lying thief JOHN... the so-called sales manager or part owner or whatever. You can't get a straight answer out of any of those guys. Their 'Lock Club', well let's just say it's a little vague. I am unfortunately a current client of OTL. I didn't realize what they were until the lies started piling up. I was first told by JOHN that he would give me first time deal for the March Madness lock club of $800. I called back to talk some more and the next guy offered it to me for $1700. After negotiating $400 and them promising to be 75% by the sweet 16 I paid them. After a winning day today I am just now out of the red by $35. After reading your column I am going to cut my losses and quit playing them. The funny thing is...the last few days I have called back and talked with several people there, telling them who I am and that I was calling in for the Lock club selections that I paid for. Guess what? Ever single person that I talked with had a DIFFERENT set of 'Lock Club Plays'. You should have heard John try to back his way out of that one when I confronted him. He basically hung up on me when I asked him how all of his guys have different picks. Pretty big Lock Club huh? The final straw for me was when I called them and confronted them with the fact that I was sent a flyer in the mail saying that they were offering a 'Lock Club' special for all of March Madness for only $199. That's a little different from the $1700 the one guy wanted, huh? When I asked for my $200 back...well, you can guess. They said the more money the client pays the better the picks get! I guess they have about 10 levels of lock club plays.
Thank you, James, for putting together a website for scamcappers. You have saved me the trouble. These guys do more damage than a thief in the night and need to be exposed.
Below is an article detailing a couple of scam operations and the lawsuit and judgment that came down against them.
Man settles with sports handicappers
Player says he lost nearly $2.3 million in dealings
By MIKE HOYEM
Published by news-press.com on December 27, 2003
A California man has settled a lawsuit he filed against a Fort Myers-based sports handicapping business he says scammed him out of more than $2 million.
But Timothy Edwin Bronkhurst, 49, of Carlsbad said Friday the settlement he agreed to about 10 days ago doesn't compensate him for anywhere near the $2.3 million he lost in his dealings with Player's Edge Inc. and National Sports Consultants Inc.
"I lost millions with these guys," Bronkhurst said. "Thank God I'm almost 50 years old and had a lot of money still. I'm glad we collected what we did."
According to the suit, which was filed Nov. 25 in U.S. District Court in Fort Myers, Bronkhurst got involved with a pair of companies that advertised nationally they could guarantee big profits for gamblers because they had "inside information" on sporting events.
The suit claimed the companies actually are "scamdicappers" instead of handicappers and use high-pressure sales techniques to squeeze money out of those who call their toll-free phone numbers.
The suit said Player's Edge operated from about December 1994 until May 2003, when it was sold to National Sports Consultants.
Both businesses, according to the suit, operated in essentially the same manner by luring gamblers with national radio advertisements that promise earnings so quickly that the money spent is more of an investment than a gamble.
"This is about getting inside information,? the ads say. "We have contacts everywhere."
According to the suit, the companies make their money by charging "package fees" for inside information and allegedly by getting kickbacks from the offshore sports bookies that take the bets. The suit said Player's Edge was run by John J. Rodney Jr., who used the names "Brian Edwards" and "Dan "The Man" Wilson" in radio ads.
Rodney, the suit alleged, sold his interest in Player's Edge in May to National Sports Consultants' owner Robert Robitzek, who calls himself "Mike Gibson" in radio spots.
Also named as defendants were a dozen other people who own at least 11 other corporations allegedly tied to the operation.
According to state Division of Corporations records, Player's Edge and National Sports Consultants list their addresses as a pair of strip malls in south Fort Myers: the Island Park Shopping Center at 16520 S. Tamiami Trail and the Summerlin Crossings shopping center at 15880 Summerlin Road.
The News-Press tried contacting National Sports Consultants on Friday by calling the company's 1-800 number.
At first, a man who said he was Mike Gibson answered and said he would give no details on the settlement.
"Why should I?" he asked.
A subsequent call was answered by a man who said his name was Jimmy Rogers.
'We have nothing to say about that," he said of the settlement. "No comment."
The suit claimed the companies have had more than 7,000 "customers/victims" since 2000 who initially are given free tips.
The handicappers, according to the suit, don't have any inside track on betting and instead "simply take their best guesses" based on public information.
According to the suit, Bronkhurst sold a business in 1998 and was looking for ways to invest his money when the stock market took a downturn.
After hearing the radio ads and visiting the Player's Edge Web site, Bronkhurst was impressed and decided to invest.
Bronkhurst started with $100,000, the suit said, and soon was depositing $55,000 to $900,000 at a time into the Player's Edge bank account.
The wagers listed in the suit said Bronkhurst placed 76 bets from Feb. 26 to May 17 and lost 56 times.
Bronkhurst said the vast majority of the money he lost was for inside information as opposed to actual bets.
"They really nailed me to the wall, these guys," Bronkhurst said.
"It's a lesson I'll take with me to the grave."
__________________________________________________ ______________________ We have heard the National Sports Consultants radio show many times on Saturday mornings. They are somewhat convincing. They promise to make you $35,000 in one week! They talk down to their listeners basically saying you are an idiot not to "invest" your money with them. Like most sports services, they only talk about their victories, never their losses. __________________________________________________ ______________________
ANOTHER ARTICLE
Man spends $20 to $40 Thousand Dollars on picks in one year!
Desperate to Recoup Gambling Losses, Ohio Man Ends Up in a New York Jail Cell
By PATRICK HEALY
New York Times
Published: January 28, 2004
APHANK, N.Y., Jan. 27 - At 57, Douglas Warner was out of work, depressed and had lost everything betting on football. Before that, he had flopped playing the stock market, and the bills were piling up. He was a Willy Loman of the post-dot-com age.
But Mr. Warner had a plan to set his life straight, his fiancée and the Suffolk County Police said on Tuesday. He would kidnap the owner of a Long Island company that had given him sports betting advice and demand that the $200,000 he had lost be returned. So last week, the police said, Mr. Warner packed a handgun, stun gun and bullet-resistant vest into his fiancée's Buick and drove from his Ohio home to New York to get his money back.
Mr. Warner's trip ended in a jail cell after an unsuccessful attempt to extort the $200,000 from Platinum Sports Advisory, the Oakdale sports betting firm he had relied on for tips. But not before Mr. Warner had enacted his own forlorn, wintertime version of "Dog Day Afternoon," the cinematic tale of a robbery gone awry.
"I just can't believe he's done this," said his fiancée, Gilda Davis, who shared a home with Mr. Warner in Springboro, Ohio, near Cincinnati. "He's been acting kind of high-strung and temperamental with me. We didn't even talk."
Mr. Warner had been traveling back and forth to Las Vegas to gamble, and when he took off last week in her car, Ms. Davis said, she assumed he had set off on another routine trip to try to regain his losses.
After arriving in New York on Thursday, Mr. Warner parked himself outside Platinum Sports Advisory and watched its employees come and go, Suffolk County Police Detective Lieutenant Edward Reilly said in a news conference on Tuesday. Mr. Warner had had heated phone conversations with the firm's executives that he meticulously tape-recorded and documented, Ms. Davis said.
On Sunday, Mr. Warner followed one of the firm's executives out of the parking lot and onto the road, but soon lost him in the Long Island traffic, the police said. He drove back to the company and waited until its owner, George Villano, 47, walked out, then grabbed him at gunpoint.
They drove to Mr. Villano's home nearby, and Mr. Villano persuaded Mr. Warner to accept $4,800 in cash as a down payment. Mr. Villano dropped Mr. Warner off at the Sayville Motor Lodge, promising that the two would meet again the next morning, when Mr. Villano would give Mr. Warner the rest of the $200,000.
Mr. Villano called the police.
At 10 a.m. Monday, Mr. Warner returned to Platinum Sports, wearing a blue bulletproof vest and carrying a stun gun. He left his loaded pistol in the Buick. When officers approached him, he pulled out the stun gun and tried to fight them off, the police said. It took five officers to subdue him.
Mr. Warner will be arraigned on Wednesday at First District Court in Central Islip on a litany of charges including kidnapping, robbery and attempted grand larceny, the police said. When his fiancée reached him by telephone, he told her not to hire a lawyer, that he would rather rot, Ms. Davis said.
She said she had been up for hours listening to Mr. Warner's taped conversations and poring over his financial records to figure out how the middle-aged, middle-class guy she had been with for 11 years decided to salvage his life in such a hapless, desperate fashion.
It began two years ago, when he lost his job with a marketing firm after having worked there for 15 years. He was a college graduate who had played football on scholarship, Ms. Davis said.
Mr. Warner tried to play the stock market, but he lost even more money, Ms. Davis said. Then, last fall, Mr. Warner heard about the legal gambling advice Platinum Sports offered for a fee, and he dived in.
Ms. Davis said he began flying to Las Vegas every week to gamble and often spent three days there and four at home. He was secretive, but Ms. Davis said that the phone rang often when he was home and that he often sent large sums of cash to New York.
Investigators said Mr. Warner had paid $20,000 to $40,000 to Platinum. The police and Suffolk County's Consumer Affairs Department said there had been no prior complaints or charges filed against the company.
Mr. Warner mentioned that the owners of Platinum were going to cut him into their business, Ms. Davis said, but there was no sign he was doing anything but losing.
"He lost everything he had," said Ms. Davis, who blames Platinum for her fiancé's woes. "They took it all. He's got about $6,000 sitting in a little piddly checking account, and the bills are atrocious. He's got nothing."
ANOTHER ARTICLE!
HANDICAPPERS BUSTED IN FLORIDA!
Book Thrown at Florida Handicappers
By Stephen Nover, Covers .com
Operating a sports handicapping service in the United States is perfectly legal, but better be smart about it.
That advice comes courtesy of Joseph Kelly, an American gaming lawyer and co-editor of the Gaming Law Review.
"Nothing for a handicapper to worry about unless he does something stupid," Kelly said during the recent BoDog Handicapping Conference in Las Vegas.
Unfortunately there are plenty of stupid, greedy touts preying on ignorant people, some suffering from a gambling addiction.
Eyebrows were raised in the sports gaming industry when 14 men involved with a sports service in Fort Myers, Fla., were arrested last month. One already has pled guilty. He faces a maximum of two years in prison and up to a $250,000 fine.
If the government, be it state or federal, starts arresting people for selling their sports opinion then things have reached an all-time low. However, in this case, far more is involved. Fraud is the key word, says Kelly. If there are allegations of fraud, law enforcement could get involved.
Asking a potential customer to pay $15,000 for inside information on a game is fraud, Kelly said. Enforcement agencies should crack down on scammers and unscrupulous marketing people claiming to be handicappers, who lie about their records, promise inside information, run boiler room operations and hassle people on the phone.
These Florida guys were drawing customers by telephone solicitation, running two websites and having a radio talk show. They referred their customers to certain offshore Internet books. These books then allegedly provided the Florida sports service access to their clients' betting information and account balances.
Reportedly the sports service guys earned referral fees if their customers bet with these books. So they were acting as agents.
"If you start accepting a part of the profits then you're getting into a dark shade of gray," Kelly said.
This comes from Kelly, acknowledged as one of the few experts in gaming law. So it's hard to define exactly what is legal and what isn't in the murky world of online sports gaming.
Where a sports service can find legal trouble is if it shares with the bookmaker any profit made from the clients it recommends to them. Not only is this unethical, law enforcement sees the handicapping service being part of illegal bookmaking. They then can prosecute them under the Wire Act.
I don't shed any tears when scammers like the Florida bunch get nailed. The handicapping industry unfortunately is polluted with fakes and bad guys. They make it tough for the legitimate ones.
So this prosecution is good. The government is saying if you're operating in such a sleazy, rip-off manner we're going to search for things to come after you.
Hyping things in an unrealistic and high-profile manner is a red flag to government. Tout services operating this way better not be hiding anything, because the government is going to search every nook and cranny to find something. Chances are they will.
SCAM MONITORING SERVICE!
Nevada Sports Monitor is being run by a group of scam artists that put themselves at the top of the list. They are doing such a poor job that it is humorous. These people include jrtips.com, charliessports.com, and usacappers.com. These guys tell lies, create fake handicappers, and only want your money. Someday they will be prosecuted and put in jail. Similar scam artists include nsawins.com and vegassi.com. They are con artists.
National Sports Consultants Scams Hockey Star
ESPN.com news services
Flyers star Jeremy Roenick gambled on sports, though he did nothing illegal and nothing against NHL rules, but says he stopped after Philadelphia general manager Bob Clarke warned him about betting.
"I enjoyed it, but I don't think I had a problem," Roenick told the Philadelphia Inquirer. "I shut it off cold turkey."
The FBI came across Roenick's name, according to a story Sunday in the Inquirer, in April during an investigation of National Sports Consultants, a gambling tout service in Fort Myers, Fla.
Investigators dropped their inquiry into Roenick's actions after concluding that he did not bet on the Flyers -- or any other hockey team -- and was not involved in any illegal activity, according to the Inquirer. The NHL does not prohibit legal gambling on sports other than hockey.
A law official said that Roenick paid the handicapping firm more than $100,000, but he told the Inquirer that it was far less than that and that his total bets were somewhere between $50,000 and $100,000.
The story does not make clear where Roenick placed his bets. National Sports Consultants has been accused of claiming falsely to have inside information on games and of taking kickbacks for referring bettors to offshore Internet casinos.
Roenick said he never talked hockey to the touts, who give tips for a fee but do not handle bets. Roenick's betting interests ran to football and basketball, according to the Inquirer.
Although Roenick said he stopped gambling after Clarke's warning in January, two touts told the Inquirer that Roenick bet into the spring. Eleven handicappers from the firm have pleaded guilty to federal gambling chargers.
MY MEAT IN THE HOT DESERT.......
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