Is it illegal to con people into thinking you have a perfect ability to pick football games by emailing out two lists: one picking one team, and the other picking the other team, and only sending...
lemmy.dbzer0.com
...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?
What law would it be breaking?
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.
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.
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.
Seems damned easy in this case.
I mean, this lemmy post would be exhibit #1 - but even without it it is not at all difficult to establish intent to deceive from just the actions OP is suggesting and nothing more. Sometimes intent is the easy part.
You’re looking it after the fact, how would you ever know in the moment?
One of the people emailed could potentially report the suspicious behavior, especially if one gets burned by the made up sports advice.
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.
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.
How would you know fraud is happening to start a lawsuit…?
You seem to be putting facts together after the fact.
...what do you think is going on here, in this thread?
It's talking about taking peoples' money based on your (fraudulent) ability to predict the outcome. There will be victims in the form of the people whose money was taken. Some of those people will see that the result didn't match. The fraud will be evident to the defrauded victims.
The original question was whether it was legal, not whether they could get away with it. If they did get caught, there is a very high likelihood they could be convicted of fraud.
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.
Any intentional deception for financial gain would be considered fraud in the U.K. at least.
Relevant xkcd
ooh, first time I see this rare tier XKCD (<1% encounter chance!)
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.
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.
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.
So when fraud happens, the victim is at fault and not the scammer? Mental gymnastics much? You sound like you're a scammer yourself tbh ...
Only certain answer is that people looking to scam others are pieces of shit. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
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.
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.
Here the intent is to commit fraud -- deception for the purpose of financial gain. It is deception because you have knowingly misrepresented your ability to predict games, and you have gained financially by selling the pick. So it would be illegal on that basis in most if not all jurisdictions. The actual mechanism by which you create the deception or profit from it are not that important.
Moreover if you accept the money by mail or by digital means and I really wanted to hurt you (and you were in the US), I would go after you for mail fraud or wire fraud, not the scheme itself. These have very harsh penalties in the US and powerful authorities with a vested interest in keeping it that way.
(I am not a lawyer)
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
Yes, fucking obviously it is illegal.
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
The better way to do this is to ahead of time predict the number of games you'll do in a row (n), and then create 2^n pseudonyms from which you post picks on a public site.
After each, abandon the pseudonyms that guessed wrong.
At the end, you'll have one pseudonym that correctly predicted n games in a row, and especially if the public site you uploaded to has records of the times each pick was posted (or you used something like the web archive), you have a verifiable 3rd party record of getting it right that you can market to your full contact list, rather than cutting out your contacts in each round.
P.S. You could probably automate this.
Nice twist!
Let's assume 1000 people, who are as real as the people you see around you. And Let's also assume these people who are in the room with us right now can't communicate with each other. You email "Team Crab will win" to 500 and "Team Monkey will win" to the other 500.
Team Monkey wins, so you send the 500 ones that saw it win another email for the next match. 250 get "Team Horse wins" and the other 250 get "Team Mr Hands wins".
Team Horse wins, so now you have: ¼ of the people who think you have a 100% success rate over only two games so they won't necessarily be convinced but may look at you with interest, ¼ which see you at 50% but come on it' only 2 games, and ½ who didn't receive your mail and are wondering what is up with that.
So let's assume all the double-winners subscribe and so does 150 of the one-time winners. That's 400 subscribers. However, you, being a big brained individual, only send an email to the 250 winners, 125 will have received "Team George W Bush will win" and the other 125 "Team Twin Towers will win".
After George W Bush smashes the Twin Towers you will have 125 happy people, 125 sad people and 150 angry people, some of whom will sue you because you didn't deliver the service they paid for, the other ones learn from the news of your scam and you are charged for fraud, losing all the money you made and then some, as well as go to jail where you will drop the soap and wake up in the psych ward with a funny jacket because it turns out you were hallucinating the whole time.
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.
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.
Trying to get a start in the scamming business?
Simpsons did it.
Professor Pigskin is just psychic.
32 teams in the NFL, 15-16 games a week.
There's approx. 240 different possible outcomes each week, chances that you land on the correct one twice in a row is near impossible.
So you wouldn't be conning anyone, unless you were picking only one game each week, in which case you have a 50% chance and therefore no one would care if you got it right twice, an octopus can do that.
Further to the above, the sports gambling industry is huge, chances that you can offer something over and above what multi-million dollar betting agencies can offer is frankly absurd unless you're an MIT Maths grad.
Not illegal, just very time-consuming bc you half your people each time. So you do all this just for 1 person to give you what, maybe $1000? Lol
P.S. I had to check if I was in the NoStupidQuestions community, sorry OP xD
Not necessarily half them. You can inform your guess by looking at sports betting odds. Maybe a weak team is playing against a strong one? Then your split could be 30/70 instead of 50/50
I actually met somebody who had better luck predicting the winners of football games by literally throwing darts at a board than anybody else in the pool.
Deception is tricking people into paying or paying more for a service by lying. And I’m pretty sure a lawyer could say that that is lying UNLESS you never mentioned your last picks and how you have good choices. Just say I’m not giving my prediction for Super Bowl unless you pay $5
I anal, but yes this is legal. You should do it and post the results. Also this is not investment advice.
I've thought about this with the stock market and predicting that it would go up or down. After enough predictions, one would have an email list of people that saw one accurately predict the stock market after n times. This could then be used to request payment for future predictions.
While I can't state that this breaks any laws, it is possible it might somehow. However, even if it doesn't, it's a really fucked up thing to do because it's conning people out of money using a scam. I highly recommend against it and responding to emails of people predicting future outcomes of events that vary wildly with any certainty.
So just the stock market then?
The stock market is a huge part of why society sucks so much. Publicly owned corporations are beholden to shareholder profits above all else, including morality.
I wonder in some sense how this isn't fundamentally (yet fucked) the same idea asthat driving
arbitrage.