We are living in the time of social media, in which the authentic and the counterfeit share the same territory. Millions of products and services are offered over various social networks each and every day, and among them is a service which used to exist just in the margins of the yellow pages: sports-handicapping selections.
Thanks to the recent legalization of sports betting, there are tens of thousands of Instagram sports-handicapping accounts, together with hundreds more cropping up every day. I signed up for a few of those’capping services to find out whether they can provide on their promises of guaranteed wins. Here’s what happened.
My Methodology
To begin, I discovered just 100 Instagram accounts which clearly offered’expert’ sports picks in exchange for cash.
I stuck with Instagram exclusively for a few factors. Not only does Instagram have additional accounts to pick from than any other stage, but I had heard a great deal of rumblings about especially bad pick services being offered on Instagram. Plus, people can boast on Instagram greater than anyplace else, and ultimately I had been looking to explore self-aggrandizing handicappers.
No social networking platform has good policing or stringent content regulators, but Instagram is a visual medium, and its authorities are normally more worried about scrubbing out a deluge of x-rated groin shots compared to sub-par handicappers. That can be different than, say, Twitter or Facebook, that concentrate a lot more about the industrial aspects in their platforms.
How I Sorted Through Instagram’s countless Thousands of Self-Professed Handicappers
There was a two-day lag between creating the first 100-account list along with the date I picked which ones to sign-up for. In that time, 13 of those 100 accounts were already defunct. Obviously, I can’t conclusively say why they disappeared, but my educated guess is that they were shut down to being fraudulent or were erased by their founders after choosing too many losers.
I intended to reach out to 30 prominent handicappers and solicit their solutions. Because I wanted to concentrate on the handicappers who’re chiefly driven by social media, I just pursued those who took repayments through submitted Venmo, PayPal, or the CashApp addresses — I remained off their sites.
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