…the next pick to the people who saw you pick the “winner”. Now half of those people see one team, the other half see you pick the other team, and whoever saw you pick the winner thinks you’ve got a 100% accuracy rate over two games. You could do that for a while and then offer to sell your pick for the Superbowl. Starting with a big enough group in the beginning, this might be really lucrative.
But is it legal?
But is it legal?
What law would it be breaking?
this might be really lucrative.
Not really, If you started this at the beginning of the regular NFL season and included the playoffs in the run up to the super bowl, you would need to start with 1,048,576 emails to have one person see you pick every game prior to the super bowl. And this is only if you send an email for one game each round.
If you started and sent an email to every person who watch the super bowl last year (~84 million) you would only have about 80 people left at the end and you would have sent close to a billion emails to do it.
And then you don’t even know if they bet.
What law would it be breaking?
Not sure about USA law, but in Australia we would call that “obtaining financial advantage by deception”. Otherwise known as “fraud”.
You would have to prove it with intent though, and that would be damn near impossible.
After your shit gets raided and there’s evidence that you sent out two sets of information to different people… Yeah that’s extremely probable.
You don’t understand how much of an electronic trail mass mailing would leave. If your mark and a burned mark were on the same email provider, a warrant would uncover this extremely simple scam.
I understand completely, you would need a reason to start investigating them to begin with, and that’s pretty easy to claim after, but during how would you know frauds happening…?
You aren’t making much sense. You are asking how people would find out they are being defrauded before they are defrauded.
Seems damned easy in this case.
Would the emails you sent to about a million people be enough to prove intent?
This is the oldest scam in the book.
Also, the question is, is it legal. Not whether you are likely to get convicted for it.
The answer to the questions btw are no, and yes. These types of fraud cases are dead easy to prove and LE secures convictions all the friggin time.
Given someone found it has an official name (Psychic Sports Picks Trick) i’m sure it’s not even close to impossible.
It should be mentioned though that it sounds like you’d need a massive pool of people for it to actually work.
Pretty easy if you keep narrowing your email pool when people see you pick a loser.
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And how would you know that’s happening?
…When you get investigated for fraud? Likely when they check your outgoing. But also by communicating with other targets of your fraudulent service. I doubt you will send 80 million emails manually, but go right ahead and test that.
I think calling 4-5 perfectly in a row would get a few people to pay for predictions.
Though, if you were smart, you’d do what any bookie does and let people bet against each other.
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Any intentional deception for financial gain would be considered fraud in the U.K. at least.
ooh, first time I see this rare tier XKCD (<1% encounter chance!)
Is it illegal to con people
In general, yes.
Tell that to the US health insurance industry
It really depends on the details of what “lucrative” means.
In general deceiving people in order to achieve material gains is called fraud and can land you in jail for a rather long time.
Only certain answer is that people looking to scam others are pieces of shit. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Who cares if it’s legal - doing it makes you an asshole, that’s what really matters.
There’s demonstrably millions of people who are absolutely fine with being assholes, especially if it’s profitable. It doesn’t matter to them in the slightest.
Tell me you didn’t get my comment without telling me you did not get my comment …
Ehh, if they’re stupid enough to believe his “ability” that’s on them
If one is cruel enough to exploit the credulity of others for personal gain, that’s on oneself.
You forgot about ties. They’re rare, but they happen, and in this scenario they work like the 0 in Roulette - they fuck over your nice and comfy 50/50 chance.
And as others already mentioned: I’m pretty sure that whole scheme wohl just be plain fraud.
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You could make a more informed split to increase your odds. Say a weak team plays against a strong team, and official sports betting offices rate the chances 30/70. Instead of splitting the two groups 50/50 you now split them 30/70 as well.
Emails (gmail at least) can also dynamically display information. So you could just change a wrong guess to a right one after the fact.
Well it’s not mathematically possible
The formula is p/(2^n)
P would be the number of people you start with, and n is the number of games.
If you start with the population of the US, 350 million people, you can only do this for about 28 matches before you run out of people.
If it makes any difference, American football seasons are only like 16 games.
“only”
I’m pretty sure people would give you money after 10 correct predictions in a row. At that point there are 350k remaining.
Except for the fact that the entire rest of the population would have gotten the emails. This relies on literally nobody talking about it.
How many coincidences do you need until you believe something to be true?
Science is usually fine with a one in twenty chance (p<0.05, 5 emails) or one in one hundred (p<0.01, 7 emails). Physics is the most strict discipline and requires up to one in three hundred (p<0.003, 9 emails), or even one in a 3.5 million chance (5 sigma, p<0.0000003, 22 emails).
Sure, most mails would be caught in the spam filter anyway and you’re not gonna get emails for every single person. And if you have two mail addresses for the same person they’d immediately catch on, once the two addresses get sent different predictions.
But the point is, we are dealing with big numbers here and it is very much reasonable to expect some level of success from such a strategy.I doubt it’d be any amount of successful. And yes it’d be caught in the spam filter with the other 95% of total emails sent every day.
Mathematically, there are not enough people on the planet to do this with every us football game for an NFL season. Could do it for just the final games, but guessing 5 isn’t impressive.
Just to do this for one team, you would need hundreds of thousands of people to get just one person. Assuming they even read your emails.
Search YouTube for “derren brown horse racing system” and learn from someone who did it. I believe it includes a discussion of the legality of it, at least in the UK.
Of course he did. This idea can up when we were discussing street psychics (magicians, hypnotists) like him and David Blaine.
I call it: divide and conquer scamming.
youd still have to be stupid enough to think he wasnt just getting lucky
which a lot of people are stupid enough so good luck
I heard about this years ago but with stock picking and sending letters through the mail.
I’m sure it’s illegal AF. But feel free to try it out and let us know.
If you’re interested in that, here’s a whole list of confidence tricks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_confidence_tricks
It’s specifically the Psychic Sports Picks Trick. And the answer is that it would be illegal at the point OP actually asks for money at the end.
What OP is suggesting is actually in that Wikipedia article. Apparently it’s called “Baltimore Stockbroker / Psychic Sports Picks”.
Thanks for finding it.
this is the life of an old school financial advisor, but with stock picks instead of sports outcomes. you often have to replace the group that got bad advice. nowadays they just push diversification and funds.
If there is a scheme that feels immoral and leads to you gaining money, you can bet that it could be argued as fraud in court.
Yes, pretending to be all knowing to take people’s money is fraud. No matter how cool the method to make that appearance of knowledge is.
What you really gotta argue is what youre providing is the ‘service’, they come to you for the experience of being touched by a higher power, the blessed vision of wisdom - and they simply donated to support such greatness
