This is another form of scam I've seen being promoted heavily.
So if you have even the slightest interest towards sports, you're likely to follow some teams' or atheles' social media accounts.
Instagram tends to freely share your personal information with "advertisers" which often just means scammers.
So this scam is often targeting sports fans through Instagram and Facebook.
And if you or your friends follow something related to gambling or sports you're likely to be targeted by such ads promoting this scam.
So let's examine what this scam is about. If you click into an ad promoting this type of scam, you'll be prompted into a Telegram channel where supposedly information about fixed matches is provided.
As you probably already know, scammers love telegram.
The room will be populated with a long history of highly polished messages about supposed information and past success stories.
However, what matters most is the most recent message in the channel.
This message will mention the exact score of a supposed fixed match.
What's the catch?
Well...
This match doesn't exist. Perhaps the teams will sound a little plausible, but then they will say [U23], which means that you can't bet on such a match anywhere.
The whole allure of this scam is to actually put your money in THEIR recommended bookmaker because it's going to be the only one accepting bets on this otherwise fictional match.
And then you'll be met with the harsh reality that this bookmaker only actually takes deposits, no withdrawals!
The above is a rating someone left for this fake bookmaker called
SpaceXlife. It appears that this scam operation has been running for 2 months.
Probably once the scammers feel like they've made enough they'll just switch to a new name and website.
All this might sound too obvious to you but people unaccustomed to online gambling could easily fall victim to something like this.
It's sad how social media has made the process of scamming so streamlined actually...
These days identifying scammers on the internet is becoming easy with me, hence you begin to tell me that you have a fixed match that I should join your telegram group then after joining your telegram group, before you tell me to pay a certain amount or before you tell me to join a telegram group I already know that you are a scammer. If I must even give you a second look, those fixed games should be popular League matches or from a reputable football competitions going on and I must see the games and I'm not even going to pay a dime for them, because I can actually do my predictions myself.
Yes OP, just as you said that it may sound obvious, but a lot of people fall victim to it, especially the gullible ones that don't understand the gimmicks used by this scammers.
I have one or two people that I follow on X(twitter) that are good predictors, though they don't drop fix matches, but mainly football predictions for followers to go bet on, and they don't ask for a dime from any of their followers, they would even tell you it's 50/50, so you already know what your doing, maybe you can just edit some of the games.