…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”.
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!)
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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)_/¯
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.
“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.
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.
I call it: divide and conquer scamming.
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.
Yes, fucking obviously it is illegal.
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)
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?
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
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.
