Inside the ‘harmful’ world of racing tipster Robert Heneghan and Pro Sports Advice: Black-market betting, ‘demise threats’, personal jets, a million followers and boasts of big-money wins that might sway weak gamblers

With his wads of cash, vast self-confidence on camera, access to private jets and helicopters, plus celebrity stardust provided by Luke Littler, Robert Heneghan exudes the air of an all-conquering horse racing tipster and is extremely keen to let the world know about himself.

His social media people film him sitting in jets in pinstriped suits, imploring people to join the club of 15,000 subscribers whom he says pay to get his betting tips. They film him at racecourses, placing large wedges of £20 notes on horses, then brandishing winning betting slips and taking large wads of earnings back off bookies. Darts star Littler, who appeared alongside Heneghan in an executive area at Cheltenham a few weeks back, was the subject of two of the videos he posted at the festival.

Heneghan has built a following of over one million across Instagram, X, Telegram, TikTok and the digital marketplace Whop for his Ireland-based ‘Pro Sports Advice’ company and he is clearly living in some luxury.

The 27-year-old Irishman’s company’s latest financial results, for 2024, no longer publicly available but seen by Daily Mail Sport, reveal a retained profit of £1.73million. He claims to have been a professional gambler since he was a 16-year-old. Land Registry documents reveal his home to be a beach-front property valued at around £1m on Ireland’s east coast. The accounts put his annual earnings in the year to December 31, 2024, at £375,000. 

Heneghan posted screenshots of £1.1m subscriber payments to his Stripe account in March and an even bigger figure after Aintree, with hundreds of Pro Sports Advice members forking out £64 a month for his top tier ‘elite VIP’ membership and 80,000 paying him £8.50 a month for his ‘standard’ facility. There’s even a ‘one-off’ £3,500 ‘Platinum Lifetime’ membership for those who are really all-in. So there should not be a cloud in his sky.

Yet in the past month, Heneghan urged his followers to put their money into what was reported to be an unregistered, black-market gambling website – and then launched a High Court defamation action against a well-known member of the racing fraternity, who claimed he received threats of violence for writing about it.

The website, Gambana, purported to be registered in the Indian Ocean island of Comoros. But the central bank which oversees the territory’s financial regulation told The Irish Times that the licence was ‘fraudulent’. 

Gearoid Norris, a Cork-based racing pundit, former Paddy Power employee and blogger whose sardonic take on the racing world under the X persona @icyestretro built a following of 27,000, published a widely-read post on his Substack channel about Heneghan’s promotion of Gambana. He then claimed to have received an anonymous call from someone purporting to know his address and the pub he drank at and telling him if he continued writing in the same vein: ‘I’m going to put a bullet through your head.’

Heneghan, who denied making any such call, sued Norris for defamation at Dublin’s High Court, where a settlement was reached earlier this month. Norris, a mature student lacking the means to pay, accepted it was not Heneghan who called him, apologised and has undertaken to publish no further material online about him or Pro Sports Advice.

The promotion of an unregulated offshore gambling outfit – operating outside of the safeguards preventing the exposure of children and vulnerable young people to gambling – is far removed from the image of Pro Sports Advice that Heneghan presents to the world. He claims to be a disseminator of ‘The World’s Most Trusted Tips’ and his website proclaims his service to be five-star, without specifying precisely who has awarded him such a rating.

Heneghan addresses what appears to be a largely young male audience in the same way as many influencers in the so-called manosphere, asking them why on earth they are missing a route to wealth he is offering them. ‘Are you sick of losing from your own betting?’ he asks. ‘I’m the most followed horse pundit in the world. I’m exactly what you’re looking for.’

Many members of the racing fraternity have told Daily Mail Sport that they were unaware of Heneghan until he recorded some successes just before the pandemic, in 2020.

The first posts on his current Instagram account date to March 2021 – a 12/1 each way bet on a horse which won at a course south west of Dublin. Pro Sports Advice, which also provides football and darts tips, was set up by his father and incorporated five years ago. Its current X account was set up five years ago.

Heneghan became better known when getting himself filmed at football’s Qatar World Cup and the World Darts Championship, cultivating an image of being a man at the centre of things. A click-hungry young audience picked up on him and another darts star, Luke Humphries, began appearing on some of his output.

Littler’s appearances with Heneghan began at Cheltenham, earlier this month, where he and his darts rival Humphries were filmed for a Pro Sports Advice social media post, in which each picked a horse for the tipster to place a £1,000 bet on, with any winnings going to charity.

Given that Littler is 19 and it is against Advertising Standards Authority rules in the UK, for anyone who is, or who appears to be, under 25 to play a significant role in a gambling advert, mainstream betting firms have been astonished by Littler’s validation of Heneghan. Even Paddy Power, sponsor of the World Darts Championships, have been unable to use him to promote their products because of his age.

Generally, Heneghan does not seek such co-stars. His social media team – flanked by his security detail, according to multiple sources we have spoken to – film him handing bookmakers the packets of cash and watching his backed horses race. The sources have told Daily Mail Sport that these bets are placed by Heneghan early in the racing day, when the racecourse is quiet and bookies relatively unoccupied, creating time and privacy to perfect social media clips.

It is thus unclear how many pre-race videos are made on horses that subsequently lose. Heneghan has mounted legal challenges against bookmakers who say he has placed such bets with them. 

One bookmaker on X, James Lovell, tweeted during Cheltenham that he had taken down a post ‘regarding a tipster having a bet with me at Cheltenham’ after taking legal advice. ‘It’s a crazy world we live in when regulated gambling is under such strong scrutiny and content provision goes unchecked,’ he said.

Heneghan does publicly promote some of his losing bets, to counter claims that he hides his losses and only promotes his winners – allegations he vehemently denies.

But the extent to which any negative news coverage of him has been shut down is extraordinary. The Irish Times reported earlier this month that some of its own articles about Heneghan and Pro Sports Advice, as well as videos about him posted by a well-known solicitor, Terry Gorry, had been delisted from Google and removed from social media sites because of suspect copyright complaints that, in some cases, were made from Vietnam and Indonesia.

The newspaper, which has extensively covered Heneghan’s promotion of Gambana and the ensuing Norris High Court case, discovered its coverage of both had been scrubbed from Google search results.

A number of the copyright complaints were based on bizarre claims that the pieces breached the copyright of New York Post articles from the 1990s. One of those articles was about the New York Giants American football team while another was about crime in New York. Some of the stories have since been restored. Norris’ popular Twitter account is still suspended.

To date, Heneghan has not responded to requests for comment on the subject. 

The results of Heneghan’s tipped horses, detailed on his website, suggests a modest performance. Racing experts have told us that he tips horses that any reasonably well-versed follower of form might go for, often betting on multiple mounts in one race to cover himself or taking a ‘cover bet’ at lower odds, which means returns are settled at those odds if the horse wins, with a refund given if the horse finishes second or third.

Heneghan placed £2,500 each way on Aintree Grand National winner I Am Maximus, the favourite, at 9-1, so was well on profit on the race – despite none of the other three horses he had bets on – Grangeclare West, Jagwar and Spanish Harlem – finishing the race. 

To the uninitiated, losing vast sums of cash might appear disastrous, but industry insiders view it as mere ‘marketing spend’ for Heneghan: part and parcel of a business model which sees him stand to earn millions in new subscriptions income from a high profile meet like Cheltenham or Aintree, where his casual, uninitiated young audience is looking for eye-catching advice. 

‘He can afford to lose that cash, as long as he can make it on the subscriptions,’ says one source. ‘Having all these large stakes gets the eyeballs in, gets the attention. He has to keep churning, churning; getting that PR exposure.’

In that sense, his Cheltenham this year was a hit, with the Littler videos going viral and bringing what seemed to have been a big uplift in subscribers on the Thursday of the meet. ‘It’s all about Cheltenham for him,’ says the source. ‘You have a good Cheltenham and you retain those people into Aintree, and then make the Royal Ascot push.’

Many of his tipped horses run at obscure overseas venues in Argentina, Chile and the US. Only one bookmaker – Bet 365 – runs a market on these niche races, which means a greater chance of the odds being less scrutinised and therefore more generous to bettors. New sign-ups betting on these horses will be permitted only a very brief period of wins before their accounts are suspended or ceilings imposed on their earnings.   

Betting experts have told us that Heneghan’s members also need to be in his ‘elite’ £64-a-month VIP club to get the tips at the headline odds. The ‘standard’ members get them hours later and even that more privileged group must be extremely quick to catch the advertised prices before the subsequent volume of bets brings the odds down.

Heneghan methodically records all his tips in detail. But it is the big picture which draws in the sign-ups: the clips of him marching towards a private jet at Aintree with a suitcase in his hand, shaking hands with trainer Willie Mullins at an enclosure, and brandishing a winning ticket with Littler.

That demographic may take great delight in it all, but addiction charities are shocked by the projection of gambling as a shortcut to immense wealth and a jet-set lifestyle for those persuaded to escape the culture of the modest bet and, in betting parlance, potentially chasing losses rather than chasing bets. ‘We would be carpeted and heavily fined if we advertised in this way,’ says a source at one established gambling firm, which asked not to be named.

Matt Zarb-Cousin, director of Clean Up Gambling and co-founder of Gamban, an app that helps people with gambling addictions, said that videos of influencer tipsters placing huge sums of money on horses risked dragging impressionable young people into gambling addictions.

‘Social media platforms and those influencers operating on them have a responsibility to understand the effect of this kind of messaging,’ he tells Daily Mail Sport. ‘This behaviour appeals directly to the demographic of young men, aged 18-24, who have the highest incidence of problem gambling and who are driving the majority of the calls for help.’

Clean Up Gambling has campaigned for greater transparency about links between tipsters and operators such as Gambana. Heneghan does include a responsible gambling message in some of his posts. The grandiosity of his clips is utterly at variance with it.

He is not alone, in this respect. Stephen Power, another racing content-maker promoting to young audiences, is also filmed staking big sums of cash, though the horses he tips which lose are very much part of his narrative and he wears his heart on his sleeve. This has contributed to the popularity of Power – aka @racingblogger. 

Unlike Heneghan, Power has been brought into racing’s inner sanctum, with access to trainers like Gordon Elliott, Gavin Cromwell and Mullins and free flights out to Australia and Dubai funded by race organisers, who see his social media following as a means of attracting new fans. In Power’s case, racing is allying itself with a man who is encouraging big spending on betting.

At time of publication, Heneghan had not responded to frequent attempts by Daily Mail Sport to contact him. We have also made multiple approaches to the Dublin legal firm Kane Tuohy, which represented Heneghan in his defamation action against Norris, asking that our inquiry be put to him as a matter of public interest. 

The firm told us that they only acted for him in connection with the Norris case and that ‘our retainer in respect thereof is at an end’. The firm did not confirm if he had been made aware of our inquiries. Gambana have not responded to inquiries.

A detailed assessment of Heneghan’s service by experienced full-time Betfair trader Caan Berry, published in February, found that an accurate assessment of him, and the three professional tipsters he claims to have working for him, is difficult, since it is impossible to determine which membership tiers his results applied to. He boasts of achieving more than ‘1,500 profit points’ without defining what this means. There is no independent verification of his results.

Trustpilot comments for his service include multiple one-star reviews from users claiming that they had been blocked or banned after questioning selections, having paid for memberships. Berry points to Trustpilot complaints about unreliable tipping times, tips being posted 20 minutes before a race is due to start and odds not being attainable.

There are positive reviews, though the negative ones are more detailed and specific. Berry’s report concludes: ‘For anyone considering joining this service, caution is advised.’

After his most high-profile Cheltenham and Aintree yet, Heneghan will probably not be concerned by such an assessment. His Instagram account suggests he’s preparing for Ireland’s Punchestown Festival. After Aintree, he headed to a meet in Rotterdam, from where a post from him stated ‘three out of four horses today’ – implying winners. The Instagram post’s soundtrack was a song called Chase the Sun.