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...

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.

Relevant xkcd

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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.

Who cares if it's legal - doing it makes you an asshole, that's what really matters.

Only certain answer is that people looking to scam others are pieces of shit. ¯_(ツ)_/¯

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.

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.

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.

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 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

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.

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.

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

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.

this is the life of an old school financial advisor, but with stock picks instead of sports outcomes. you often have to replace the group that got bad advice. nowadays they just push diversification and funds.

Trying to get a start in the scamming business?

Simpsons did it.

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.

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

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

It's just a horizontal pyramid scheme, which is illegal. Probably not called like that, but the principle is similar of you building on the expense of someone else.

I anal, but yes this is legal. You should do it and post the results. Also this is not investment advice.

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.