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Yeah, there's actually an old sports betting scam that works similarly. You send out letters to tons of potential gamblers saying something to the effect of 'T
by dtparr 7y ago
Yeah, there's actually an old sports betting scam that works similarly. You send out letters to tons of potential gamblers saying something to the effect of 'The <team>'s games are fixed and I've got the inside info. To prove it, I'll predict the winner of the first n games' Then each week, you send half the group one prediction and the other half the other. Whichever half was wrong, you ignore, and the the 'correct half' you repeat with the next week. After n weeks, you have 1/(2^n) of your original group who've seen you be right each week, and at your desired n, you ask for money to keep going.
- mywittyname 7y agoIt's an interesting scam, but we all know how quickly n grows in this scenario. You'd need 66k potentials to have one correct guess, per team, per season in the NFL. And the "winner" of you lottery needs to have enough scratch to make your scam worthwhile, and be dumb enough to part with it for a peak of your post-season picks.
- Ididntdothis 7y agoI think with some common sense and understanding of the sport you can probably narrow down things quite a bit.
- marcosdumay 7y agoWhy would you send more than 3 or 4 free "predictions"?
- greiskul 7y agoYeah, not only you get a bigger pool of victims with a few predictions, and the idea is that you want there to be games left in the season, so they pay you money for the predictions of the rest of the season so they can gamble.
- scandox 7y agoYeah they made an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Hour based on that scam. So it's a golden oldie.
- ashtonkem 6y agoThe modern version of that is writing a file for each possible outcome to a private Dropbox, and then delete all the wrong files. You can then make the folder public and tout how you clearly wrote it before the tournament began, because Dropbox wouldn’t lie just for you.