What happened to our bookie? Help solve the mystery (fun story)

So I am in a GroupMe with 15 other buddies (some are from MSB). We all bet on sports and 12 of us play fantasy together.

As is common practice, we all have multiple bookies that we play with, as it allows us to shop for the best lines/totals. We're always on the lookout for guys with quality websites. One of our guys, Mac, has a buddy who refers us to a bookie. Let's call him Tyler. Quality website, good credit line, easy settlements - a nice addition to our rolodex. As a bonus, he offers a $200 referral fee. Mac gets 8 of us to sign up and offers to split the referrals with us, so we each make $100 just for signing up, and Mac rakes a nice chunk. We all talk to Tyler on the phone and he sounds like a stand-up guy. Typical southern white dude, and he's articulate over text messages to boot.


Fast forward to this morning. Every single one of us is in + money since the start of college football. None of us are high rollers, we're all $100-$200/game bettors, but we've all been on a roll. Everyone is up between $500-5000. So this man paid out $1600 in referral fees and has been taken to the cleaners week after week to start the season. He just needs to be patient and wait for us to lose it all back, right?

One of our guys is on snapchat this morning and sees an interesting addition to his "Quick Add" section (for the old men here, it basically makes a recommendation if someone is in your contact list or has mutual friends). Tyler's information is listed there, but it's some black guy in the picture








So of course, we all get curious. Mac texts the guy that referred us to tyler and he said "Tyler is 100% white. No way that's him." He then notes that he hasn't actually met Tyler in person, though. Someone else texts Tyler and asks him a goofy question about settling (just to see if he responds), and the message sends as a text message (green text) instead of iMessage (which it was when we set up with him).




Seems to me like there are a few options here:

A) This is all a big misunderstanding. Tyler was black all along

B) Tyler grabbed a stock image of a scary black guy and set it as his snap picture as a scare tactic so that people would be too scared to not pay him.

C) This guy killed Tyler and took his phone.

D) Tyler changed his phone number so that we couldn't contact him and he wouldn't have to pay us or his other clients, and this black guy is the recipient of Tyler's old phone number.



Given the circumstances, I think Option D is the most likely. The GroupMe was going nuts this morning with a nice combination of memes and panics, so at worst, we'll come out of this with a great story. This would be the second time I've had a bookie skip town. Still anxiously waiting to see if he responds to the text.