He got a 700 quid free bet where you donât get your stake back.
He used it all up to win 13
Quid
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Point Blank: Rob Heneghan Is Telling Followers to Send âŹ2,000 to Anjouan
Pro Sports Advice paid its director âŹ443,808 for the year ended 31 December 2024
Itâs a sound you never hear, only see the results of. The mouse never had a chance. He was just going about his business when he spotted some cheese. The cheese was a mirage, much like the urgency conveyed by the bulging eyes in Rob Heneghanâs latest promo video.
Rob Heneghan, founder of betting service Pro Sports Advice, has advised followers to deposit âŹ2,000 with an online sportsbook licensed in Anjouan, a self-governing island in the Comoros archipelago. The offer includes a 100% deposit bonus up to âŹ5,000. The operator sits outside Irish and UK gambling regulation. This is happening in the same period that Pro Sports Advice reported profits of âŹ718,546 for the year ended 31 December 2024 and paid its director âŹ443,808 in remuneration.
When contacted directly, the sportsbook confirmed that the bonus carries a minimum 32-times wagering requirement at odds of 1.5 or greater. A âŹ5,000 bonus therefore requires âŹ160,000 in qualifying bets before any withdrawal is possible.
In July 2025, the Irish Examiner reported that the Central Bank was investigating influencer Jonathan Finlay for directing followers to an unregulated offshore trading platform. Private channels. Specific offshore operators. Unregulated financial advice framed as a straightforward way to make money. That combination was sufficient to attract regulatory scrutiny.
Rob Heneghan did the same thing Jonathan Finlay did: offering unregulated financial advice dressed up as opportunity. It followed a familiar playbook. Before offshore sportsbooks, Heneghan funnelled followers towards offshore trading products using the same mechanics: gated access, manufactured urgency, large upfront deposits, and confidence-heavy claims framed as simple, repeatable routes to profit. Followers were bludgeoned towards specific platforms. The difference is that Heneghan was not investigated.
That contrast has already been noted. This January, The Phoenix reported that Pro Sports Adviceâs balance sheet lists a residential property valued at just over âŹ1 million: a five-bedroom house at Silver Beach, Gormanston, overlooking the Irish Sea. The property was added following a year in which the company recorded just under âŹ720,000 in profit. The asset, complete with basement bar and wine room, now sits on the companyâs books while followers are being directed offshore. As The Phoenix put it: âWinner alright.â
If you want to understand Rob Heneghan, stop staring at the balance sheet and look at the performance. The briefcase carried around racecourses. The videos. The theatre. This is someone performing importance rather than earning it. If you canât see past the props, youâll still be nodding along next year, wondering how the beachfront house managed to grow an extension while your account quietly went the other way.
The issue here is not licensing technicalities or whether small print exists. It is asymmetry. Followers are being asked to move thousands offshore into structures designed to keep money in play, while the business doing the directing is insulated from whatever happens next.
If you are being encouraged to deposit money with offshore sportsbooks, while watching tactics recycled from influencers now under Central Bank investigation, and you still donât see whatâs happening, ask a simpler question. Why are you funding his lifestyle? Why are you paying for the videos and the theatre, while everyone who actually matters in racing considers him a joke? Serious bettors donât follow him. Bookmakers donât respect him. The only people taking him seriously are the ones being asked to send money first and ask questions later.
In my view, Rob Heneghan is not regarded as a serious figure within the betting industry. He is held in no esteem by bookmakers or serious bettors. He is seen as a grifter operating at scale. The problem is the information vacuum that stops this reality reaching the people in their twenties who have already paid for his beachfront house, only to be served another bulging-eye video selling the next scheme.
Strip away the nonsense of being an âeleven-year professional gamblerâ and what remains is not a professional at all, but a business that requires a constant flow of new subscriptions to survive. Cheltenham is the cash cow. Make this March his worst one yet. Inform your younger friends of the facts and hope the next set of accounts doesnât include an extension to the beach house paid for by unsuspecting punters. None of this is hidden. Itâs documented. Itâs reported. And itâs happening in plain sight.
3 Likes
Heâs making some twine
Icy definitely wrote that
You sound like me⌠I had a bit of a niche thing going aswell and used spend endless hours researching⌠I did very well at it but it came to the point either bet big which wouldâve been stupid or leave it off because as you say the return was nowhere near worth all the time I was putting inâŚ
It became a mundane poorly paid job !
1 Like
Is that one of Icyâs pseudonyms?
Yes.
Give a look at this from 8:40.
Scanned it fairly quickly. What are we looking out for in the video?
Bookie slow rolled/under paid him
I noticed he skipped a hundred when he was counting it out but when your man never pulled him up on it just thought I was mistaken. Is there a hullaballoo about it now?
How are they doing this?
Thru must know Elon musk.
They took out his whatâs app as well the first time.
Id say theyâre using the same bot farms that joe.ie used.
The icy tentacles of PSA know no bounds
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âItâs not a licence to print money. I know plenty of poor bookies, who had a go and went brokeâ
Anthony Kaminskas used be a professional gambler, but now leads his own bookmaking firm.
Anthony Kaminskas of AK Bets. Photo: Gerry Mooney
John Burns
It was only a ÂŁ25 bet on an American basketball game â but Anthony Kaminskas knew immediately it was trouble.
The wager was being placed by a new customer to his company, AK Bets, so he refused to accept the full stake.
âI recognised his bet, because it was a similar strategy to what I used to do when I was gambling professionally,â Kaminskas explains.
The punter was Dan Rosenheck, sports and data editor with The Economist magazine, who builds statistical models to work out the probabilities of teams winning. He later flew to Dublin to ask Kaminskas how come the Irish company had clocked him from the off.
The saga was included in the Christmas issue of The Economist in an article revealing how sports-betting firms use complex tools to stop skilful and successful gamblers.
Kaminskas says itâs simple maths. Bookies pay a turnover tax of 2pc on the total value of all bets placed. So why should his firm accept a bet from a customer they think will win, and pay a turnover tax on top?
âI have to pay for the pleasure of taking his bets? Like, what planet are we on here?â he says with a laugh.
âThereâs no right to bet. If there was, you would see a stripping back of the markets. You wouldnât have anywhere near the same amount of choice. The black market would still have all the choice. All these things are interlinked.â
Weâre sitting above a pub in Rathgar, in one of three small rooms used by AK Bets. Launched just before Cheltenham in 2023, it has over 54,000 online accounts and 25 pitches at race courses, including number one on the rails at Punchestown.
Whatâs interesting about Kaminskas isnât the bets he takes, but the argument he makes â that more regulation of bookies, and higher taxes, however well-Âintentioned, will not have the desired effect.
Instead, liquidity will be stripped from licensed operators â and ultimately more problem gamblers will be pushed towards the black market.
People have no idea about the economics of bookmaking, he says. They just repeat: âBookmakers always make money. You never see a poor bookie.â But they donât take account of survivorship bias.
âI can show you plenty of poor bookies, who had a go and have gone broke,â Kaminskas says. âItâs not a licence to print money. You have to work bloody hard at it, you have to know what youâre doing, and be able to absorb the cost. And thatâs what weâre trying to do.â
Ireland now has a gambling regulator, and restrictions on advertising and marketing are coming into effect in a bid to protect children and reduce problem gambling.
âItâs unbelievably self-defeating,â he says of the new regime. âItâs going to create more harm. I think the rates of problem gambling will increase in real terms. Iâm really passionate about this â theyâre gonna make it worse.
âIf politicians want to solve problem gambling and have a functioning industry with no leakage to the unregulated market, itâs very important they speak to people like me.
"Thereâs an unbelievable lack of knowledge about the betting ecosystem.â
All this is delivered in mellifluous Mancunian tones. Kaminskas is originally from Rochdale, and moved to Dublin in 2008 to take a job with Paddy Power. He was interviewed by the Irish company over the telephone as he stood in the lobby of the Treasure Island casino in Las Vegas, where he was celebrating his 21st birthday.
He was always good at maths. As a student, he worked in betting shops, starting in Coral in 2006. He remembers one particularly rough shop in Salford.
âIt was dangerous, I didnât enjoy it at all. A fella got shot dead outside. People came in trying to rip TVs off the wall â that kind of thing. But I needed the money.â
Presumably he saw stark examples of problem gambling?
He did. Kaminskas recalls a guy putting all his money into a machine before Christmas, losing ÂŁ400 â everything he had. Not nice to see, he agrees, but he says context matters.
âPut that same shop in Knightsbridge in London, and the guy wouldnât pick up 400 quid if he walked past it on the street. So itâs really difficult to have one-size-fits-all regulations,â he argues.
âSo yeah, I saw a couple of instances of problem gambling, but also tens of thousands of people gambling within their means and having fun. We donât recognise the benefits of it.â
He studied business economics with gambling studies at the University of Salford, a course that was discontinued soon afterwards.
âI remember going up on stage to get my degree at the graduation ceremony, and some people in the audience were sniggering when the gambling side of it was mentioned,â he recalls.
They wouldnât be laughing if they heard what Kaminskas made as a professional gambler â âŹ750,000 a year.
He turned pro after spending a decade with Paddy Power, where he finished up as head of greyhound racing. The culture of the firm changed, Kaminskas says.
âIt got very corporate, very English,â he smiles. âI used to like the craic and the non-PC nature.
"Towards the end there were weekly meetings on performance, micro-managing. Somebody wanted me to break down my day in five-minute increments.
âThe vibe changed, and it became real penny-pinchy. I stopped enjoying it.â
The perception of a professional gambler is that itâs glamorous and fuelled by adrenaline, with constant highs and lows.
Wrong again, he says. Youâre sitting at a computer all day. It can be boring.
âIâm fairly dead inside as a human,â he claims. âIf I won 50 grand in a day, or lost 50 grand in a day, you couldnât tell. Iâd still have quite a monotone voice.
"I only get annoyed when something isnât done right. If I predicted something and put something in place and it hasnât been executed properly â that annoys me.â
For example he is âhappyâ if a horse he backs at 10/1 starts a race at 6/1 and loses. But if a horse he backs at 10/1 starts at 20/1 and wins, heâs cheesed off, because the process didnât work, or he entered the market at the wrong time.
His biggest win?
âI was in a group of lads that won just over a million quid in a day. Probably canât go into too much detail.â
Biggest single loss?
â75k, maybe. I donât analyse results. I analyse the process of how I came to it.â
He got into bookmaking because he saw a niche in the market â offering better customer service at racetracks, and concentrating on punters who bet between âŹ100 and âŹ1,000, leaving the âŹ5 to âŹ10 crowd with Paddy Power.
âOur average bet size online is about 50 or 60 quid, which is quite a lot when you consider there are still guys betting 10p,â he says. âOur average bet might be the highest around.â
He doesnât go after the high rollers. âThey could wipe me out with a good runâ. AK Bets had a pitch at Ascot, for which it paid ÂŁ100,000 â but he sold it for the same amount after a year.
âIt was in the royal enclosure, which was great for PR, because we were on ITV a few times,â he says.
âEveryone there had name badges on them. Iâm a bit nosey, so I wanted to know who was betting with us, so Iâm on Google. We had one customer worth ÂŁ4.2bn, and he was having a fiver each way.
âThatâs just not for me. It annoys me more than anything. Give me a couple of builders and scaffolders and itâs more interesting. I prefer Cheltenham.â
While the margin at racetracks is 8pc-10pc, online it might be as low as 1pc, he says, because the cost base is high. With a staff of about 27, AK Betsâ payroll is in six figures a month. The general betting duty in the UK is 15pc, while the remote betting duty is currently 21pc, but will be 40pc from April.
No politician will lose votes by slapping more tax on bookies â and Kaminskas knows itâs tough to argue that extra regulation and tax could be self-defeating.
But well-meaning regulators and governments who want to improve player safety â âa very valid and noble causeâ â do not realise the second-order consequences of what theyâre doing, he insists.
âI have more compliance officers than traders. Thatâs the industry. What can send me under these days is not someone winning a bet. Itâs failing on some regulation, and losing my licence.
âCompliance and player safety are unbelievably stringent, which people say is good, and I say is good. But the knock-on effect if you curtail advertising and tax bookmakers to the hilt is that you kick the can into an area where people canât see it. And thatâs whatâs happening in our industry at the moment.â
Onboarding new customers is difficult, due to the amount of form-filling and checks required, including bank statements and proof of income.
âYou canât bet in Ireland with us until you provide documents. Which people will say is great, but itâs an unbelievable barrier to entry.
"We donât advertise in Ireland because we canât onboard customers without seeing their ID. Which I agree with it â but you can find non-regulated bookmakers on Google and start betting straight away.â
When taxes on bookies go up, their prices get worse, as they have to absorb the costs â which means customers lose faster, so theyâll migrate offshore for better prices and less friction, is his argument.
âWeâre literally a penny on the dollar company. We probably turn over a quarter of a billion a year and make 2.5 million in profit,â he says.
âTheyâre stripping out liquidity from bookmakers. If I was designing the system, Iâd have lower tax rates. Iâd be injecting more liquidity into the system.â
The spectre of the black market â often raised to justify light-touch regulation of licensed bookmakers â lost some of its sting after Paddy Power co-founder Stewart Kenny admitted he over-stated the threat during his time at the company. âIâm embarrassed to admit this,â he said. âWe knew it was way exaggerated.â
I put this to Kaminskas, who insists the threat is real.
âTo think thereâs no substitute for the licensed industry is totally wrong,â he says. âFive years ago in Belgium, the licensed industry had 85pc of the market and the unregulated 15pc. Itâs flipped the other way around.
"In the Netherlands, they massively ramped up taxes and licensed bookmakers began withdrawing. Theyâre actually reversing course there.â
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Kenny is âunbelievably deludedâ in his calls for higher taxes and more regulation. âI believe the Buddhist reincarnation of Stuart Kenny is unbelievably well intentioned. But I also think he has absolutely no visibility of the second-order consequences of what heâs proposing.
âThe issues that problem gamblers will face down the line will be off the charts.â
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Heâs full of shite⌠heâs annoyed at the lad worth 4.2 billion but only having a fiver each way bet because he wants yer man to be a degenerate and wants to fleece him
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