…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?
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
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 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
Simpsons did it.
Professor Pigskin is just psychic.
I call it: divide and conquer scamming.
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.
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.
Any intentional deception for financial gain would be considered fraud in the U.K. at least.
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.
The best frauds are the legal ones.
And we shall keep it that way if you bribe, I mean, if you donate to my campaign.
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.
You’re looking it after the fact, how would you ever know in the moment?
Seems damned easy in this case.
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.
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.
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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.
I anal, but yes this is legal. You should do it and post the results. Also this is not investment advice.
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.
I wonder in some sense how this isn’t fundamentally (yet fucked) the same idea asthat driving
arbitrage.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.
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.
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 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
What OP is suggesting is actually in that Wikipedia article. Apparently it’s called “Baltimore Stockbroker / Psychic Sports Picks”.
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.
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
