Would this scam be illegal? If so, why?

Factual Questions
1

NOTE: I’m not asking if this scam would work. There are clearly too many major practical obstacles for anyone with a brain to try it. I’m just curious as to whether it would break any laws.

At the start of, let’s say, the NFL season, I send out X letters or emails or what have you to random people, where X is a very large number. In half of these letters, which are composed in some very eye-catching way so that a lot of people take notice of them before disposing of them, I predict that team A will beat team B on Sunday, while in the other half, I predict team B’s victory. I keep track of which addresses receive which letter.

After the game, I dispose of the addresses that received the incorrect prediction. I then repeat the process with a week 2 game. Repeat for 13 weeks, or whatever the length of the season is. Each week, any person who received an incorrect prediction is discarded, so that by the end, I have Y people (Y being much, much smaller than X), who have received a message from me every week correctly predicting the outcome of one of that week’s games. Presumably some fraction of the Y people will have sat up and taken notice. Also presumably, the people who were discarded after receiving a false prediction have dismissed me as a harmless crank.

So far, so legal. Now comes the clever bit. I send one more letter to each of the Y people, reading as follows: “Hello, person! You may have noticed that I have correctly predicted the outcome of 13 football games in a row. These predictions were sent to you free of charge. I have one more prediction to make. For the low, low sum of $Z (where Z is a large enough amount to offset the cost of all the mailings so far and leave me with a tidy profit), I will send you my prediction for the winner of the Super Bowl!”

Some small percentage of Y will be suckered in, send me the cash, I send them a random prediction, and disappear with my millions to my private island in the South Pacific. Ta-da!

So, what laws, if any, have I broken? I’ve carefully avoided making any false claims or promises. Indeed, I haven’t lied once. Half of the people who send me money and place their bets will be extremely annoyed with me, but hey, buyer beware. The other half will be thrilled with my service!

Oh, and also, forty bazillion bonus SDMB points to anyone who can identify where I originally saw this idea!

2

Well, I originally saw it in “The Best” by Peter Passell a book written published in 1974.

3

It’s a pretty straightforward case of fraud.

Actual legal definition will vary depending on where you are, but the one sure bet in that scenario would be on the “Chargers.” (Haw, haw, haw.)

4

I think, as this is a legal hypothetical, it might do better in IMHO than GQ.

I would surmise that the authorities could nail you for unauthorized gambling, if nothing else.

5

It is an old game, racetrack touts give hot tips to punters at random, if they come in, the tout expects a tip.

6

What’s to prevent all those people from comparing notes?

Edit: Sorry. You didn’t ask about the feasability, just the legality. :smack:

7

:dubious:

8

I think I read about this one in “John Scarne’s Guide to Gambling” which is the (now somewhat dated) bible to all kinds of scams from carnivals to casinos to big cons.

9

Happened in a Nero Wolfe mystery.

10

How would they all know each other? They’re supposed to be randomly sent out.

11

Word about the Nigerian Email scams eventually got out…

12

Direct-mail fraud results when a deceptive or misleading offer is sent to consumers via a mass mailing that causes the consumer to remit money for a product or a service with unwarranted or false expectations.

13

John Allan Paulos has described such a scheme in at least one of his books.

14

Incidentally, if you started out mailing to one million people, at the end of 13 weeks you have only sent correct predictions to 122 of them. Good luck recouping your initial mailing costs.

15

Is it, though? I’ve been very careful to make no false claims*. Nothing I’ve said in my communications has been factually incorrect. I have never claimed that the prediction I’m selling is any better than flipping a coin. That conclusion has been drawn by the sucker…er…customer.

I’m not trying to be obtuse here. I’m not a lawyer, and am just curious about how the law would handle this. I suppose a case could be made that I was intending to sell nothing for something. Is intent enough to make it fraud?

*With a nod toward Bearflag, let’s ignore the exact wording of my letters as spelled out in the OP, and just stipulate that I’ve managed to word it “honestly”. Surely we can all agree that it’s possible to do that, even if I haven’t managed it myself on the first try.

As to the source, I’ll spoiler it in case anyone wants to keep guessing:

I first saw this as a kid on an episode of Square One TV’s Mathnet. I ran across it again years later, and got thinking about it. I think on the show, the bad guy ended up trying to outright steal a diamond or something, but it got me wondering how he could be arrested just for this scam if he had just stuck to that. I’m not surprised to learn it’s been around much longer than that.

16

Heh, interesting to see the old “grain of wheat on the chessboard” problem in reverse!

17

Oh, I know. As I said, there are obvious practical obstacles, this being probably the largest.

18

Yeah, I was about to say that. Except, IIRC, his scheme involves a stock market tout. The crook initially sends a message to a large number of people, telling half that the market will be up the next day, half that it will be down. The ones that got the correct message get a second message, half saying it will go up, half go down. etc. Eventually a few people get many correct messages in a row.

19

Maybe this…

“I have sent you advance letters containing the actual outcome of 13 games.”

20

I assume it’s fraud, and illegal.

The biggest obstacle in getting it to work is having the series of correct predictions end up in the hands of someone who is very gullible, yet has money to waste on buying tips from anonymous sources.