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... - eviltoast

…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?

  • EuroNutellaMan@lemmy.world
    121·
    1 year ago

    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.