The Integra Club - A Lesson From The History Books

The Integra Club scam is one that was hatched in or around 2003. The scammers have long since come and gone, but echos of this ’system’ are still reverberating around the horse racing world. It’s one of the oldest tricks in the book but people continue to fall for it in its many subtly different guises.
History has a funny way of repeating itself and this is starkly obvious in the case of the Integra Club scam. We can learn a lot from our (and others’) mistakes; unfortunately this scam still continues to reel in some naive ‘investors’ and the scammers get away with it for a while until — eventually — the law catches up with them.

The Integra Club — and the many copycats based on a similar theme — work like this: first they offer you guaranteed returns on a set investment. You send them a cheque and they send an even bigger one back in a couple of months. Sounds good. In fact the Integra scam promised to send back a cheque for three times your original investment every single month. Wow! These guys must be master betsmen. They must be able to predict accurately pretty much every winner in every race. Erm, of course they can’t. So what was the secret? How could they give back three times your investment every month? They must be fixing races.

Unfortunately the answer is even simpler than fixing races: they simply didn’t pay out. Ever. Investors were told that they would have to wait for a couple of months before anything started coming back in. Within two months the scammers had upped sticks and gone. No more Integra Club. No names, no addresses. Another very similar scam came to light late in 2004. Investigators believed that the people behind the Integra Club scam were involved as the story was pretty much the same. Again people fell for the trick and again lots of people were a poorer as a result.

If you are offered a way to increase your money without any effort at all over a very short period of time then ask yourself: is this too good to be true? If it does seem that way then think about your involvement very carefully indeed.