…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?
What law would it be breaking?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Seems damned easy in this case.
Given someone found it has an official name (Psychic Sports Picks Trick) i’m sure it’s not even close to impossible.
It should be mentioned though that it sounds like you’d need a massive pool of people for it to actually work.
I mean, this lemmy post would be exhibit #1 - but even without it it is not at all difficult to establish intent to deceive from just the actions OP is suggesting and nothing more. Sometimes intent is the easy part.
Pretty easy if you keep narrowing your email pool when people see you pick a loser.
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.
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Any intentional deception for financial gain would be considered fraud in the U.K. at least.