The ASA are putting pressure on Tipsters!!!

[Conans]

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Just a note to inform you all that the ASA are finally putting a little pressure on those tipsters that advertise in racing publications. We recently received this e-mail (I've deleted any reference to individuals or tipsters but feel this is long overdue and wanted to applaud it). Hopefully those tipsters who have made a living from conning the general public and giving our trade a bad name will soon be unable to advertise! The ASA is responsible for regulating non-broadcast advertisements in the <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" />UK. It does so by ensuring that everyone who commissions, prepares, produces and publishes advertisements observes the British Code of Advertising, Sales Promotion and Direct Marketing (the CAP Code).

In addition to investigating complaints, the ASA conducts regular compliance checks. Your advertisement that appeared in The Racing Post on XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX came up in one of those checks.

Your advertisement makes a number of claims about winning horses that you have correctly predicted and profit figures for those, as well as success rates for those predictions.

Marketers must be able to substantiate claims that they have tipped particular winners or achieved a certain level of profit. To do this, they should “proof†forecasts, i.e. lodge all forecasts with an independent third party before the events to which they refer take place.

Ideally, marketers should “proof†forecasts with an independent third party such as a well known and reputable firm of accountants or solicitors. If marketers “proof†forecasts with the publishers of their advertisements, the publishers should be able to provide documentary evidence that the forecasts were lodged with them before the relevant events took place and that their “proofing†systems for recording such forecasts have been approved and regularly monitored by a well known and reputable firm of accountants or solicitors.

I attach the Committee of Advertising Practice Help Note on Betting Tipster Services for your futher reference.

Please send us, in writing, information to support the claims in your advertisement by XXXXXXXXXXXXX, or your assurance that the advertisement will not appear again without suitable amendments to bring it in line with Code requirements .............

I hope you find this of interest and realise that not every tipster is a con artist!

[maria]

Re: The ASA are putting pressure on Tipsters!!! Maybe to you, as a tipster, that feels like "pressure". To me, it sounds very like empty and powerless rhetoric from an alleged watchdog with absolutely no teeth at all, and that you can throw it in the bin with impunity and absolutely no adverse consequences at all, and certainly continue to advertise in the RP, whose "proofing" claims are an unverifiable joke, and like any newspaper, tend to be on their advertisers' side when the chips are down. Call me cynical ... :eek