A tipster's record is the whole pitch — so it's the thing most worth faking. The good news is that most of the tricks follow a handful of patterns. Once you can see them, they're hard to unsee. Here's how fake records are built, and how to see through each one.
Deleted losers
The oldest trick: post lots of selections, quietly delete the losers, and keep the winners. The surviving record looks superb. The defence is simple — insist on selections that are locked once posted and timestamped before the off. If a service can edit history, you have to assume it does.
Screenshot "proof"
A screenshot of a winning bet slip proves someone, somewhere, backed a winner once. It proves nothing about the record as a whole, and it's trivially cherry-picked (or faked outright). Real proof is a complete, timestamped ledger you can inspect — not a highlight reel.
"ROI" with no stakes
A big ROI figure sounds authoritative, but ROI depends entirely on how you stake and the prices you actually got — neither of which a tipster controls or usually discloses. A quoted ROI with no transparent staking plan and no verifiable prices is a marketing number, not a result. This is also why we deliberately don't headline a single ROI: we can't know your stakes, so claiming one would be fiction.
Advised prices you could never get
Some records are settled at prices that briefly flashed up and vanished, or at early prices no ordinary punter could actually take. If the "advised odds" are consistently bigger than what was really available, the record is inflated. Honest settlement uses prices you could genuinely have taken — and the fairest benchmark of all is whether the tip beat the closing price.
Strike rate without odds
"80% winners!" means nothing without the prices. You can hit 80% backing odds-on shots and still go broke. A record that trumpets strike rate but hides the odds is steering you away from the number that matters. It's a big part of why so many tipster followers lose money.
Unverifiable everything
The common thread is that you're asked to trust rather than check. The single best filter is verifiability: can you see the full record, with losers, timestamped before each off, settled at real prices, ideally with independent oversight? If yes, the tricks above all fall apart. If no, treat the record as marketing.
That's the bar we try to clear on our own proofing page — and if you want the fuller picture of what honest looks like, see what an honest tips service actually looks like.