…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.
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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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.
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“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)_/¯
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.
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.
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.
Yes, fucking obviously it is illegal.
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
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!
