I’m not really willing to stipulate that you can word things in a way such as to not be fraud while still being able to get substantial returns from the victims. The legal system isn’t really so stupid that it can’t consider lying by omission to be lying. Maybe it’s a slightly tougher case to make, but I think you’d be nailed for fraud.
Birthday problem. If you send a letter to 10,000 people out of a total population of 7 billion, and within that population any individual person knows only 100 other people, there’s about a 50% chance that you’ve sent the letter to two people who know each other.
What have I omitted? The fact that I’ve sent other letters with predictions that turned out to be wrong? OK, I could see that. But then does that mean that all business people need to disclose all of their previous failures in their advertising?
I think I saw this on The Simpsons.
I frequently see spam for the free “Lock of the Week” from “experts” on football or whatever, and I always assume that it is from people doing exactly what you proposed.
I know this thread is about the legality, and not the practicality, but this is just clearly bad tactics.
You should send them all the same prediction. That way you have a decent chance that no one is trying to get you punished.
You could speed things up a bit by picking all the games in one week, rather than going the whole season with one team. Sure, you would only get one right out of 65536, but you could try agian every week. The sucker(s) who gets the correct predicion might find it more impressive having a week’s game results all right in front of him. He might start to imagine he could win the office pool every week.
I don’t see a problem with “predicted,” unless the word happens to have been defined for legal purposes in a section related to fraud or gambling.
A prediction is just a statement about a future event. It doesn’t necessarily have to be based on any kind of facts, nor does it necessarily have to be compatible with other predictions that may have been made, nor does the predictor have to believe it. Newspaper horoscope writers have used the term.
I’d definitely heard of this exact type of fraud being done with investments – mass email prediction up or down to 1000 people, then after 10 iterations, solicit the people who got sent 10 correct guesses to pay for your next prediction. I’m sure it’s fraud of course, but I can’t find out how old this plan is – it may be on Snopes, but I can’t search for this particular scam. The only thing Smeghead: has done is switch investment prediction with sports betting.
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On review I noticed that suranyi: and Thudlow Boink: have already said this. Oh, well, we may still be able to answer the legality, if we find the snopes article. Or find out how John Allan Paulos addresses it.
I dunno. On a coin flip, if I tell half the people it’ll be heads and the other half of the people that it’ll be tales, I can’t see how I’ve “predicted” anything. I think a prediction means a definitive statement about the future… “foretell with precision.” If your “prediction” covers all possible bases, then it’s not a “prediction” IMHO.
The astonishingly impressive Derren Brown did this with horse racing in The System.
Here’s the entire programme on You Tube!: - YouTube
But no one statement here is so inclusive. He’s making different predictions to different people. Each prediction is individually a definitive statement about a future event. For the audience to the appeal, he has accurately predicted so many results in a row.
Think of a television weather forecaster. In the morning news hour that you watch, he calls for rain on Saturday. Later, somebody else watches the same forecaster, but by this time, what with shifting fronts and updated models, he’s changed his mind; it’s not going to rain on Saturday. Both statements are “predictions.” The fact that the same person has made different predictions at different moments is immaterial. Nor is the truth value of either affected by the converse statement. If it does rain on Saturday, you’ll say he’s a good forecaster, even if by then it’s a surprise to him.
How so? Sending people tips isn’t gambling.
I’m no lawyer, and I’d be interested to see what actual lawyers have to say, but my impression of the law was that it wasn’t as absolute as it being made out to be here. I don’t think that just because you didn’t technically say anything false would be enough to save you from a fraud charge. I think its pretty clear by your collective actions that you intended to defraud people.
So a prosecution wouldn’t necessarily say “oh well, he didn’t technically claim magical powers, so no harm done”. They would look at all the facts: that you sent many predictions, specifically culled people who got incorrect predictions, specifically ensured that you only targeted people who got a string of correct predictions while keeping them in the dark about all the other incorrect predictions, etc. All together, this makes a compelling case that you did intend to fraudulently imply an ability to predict outcomes better than blind chance.
I don’t know enough about the law to say that is definitely the case, but I’d be surprised if the law could be effective if it was so easy to work around it with technicalities like this. Especially for things like fraud, where there must be lots of innuendos and figurative statements that are obviously intended to deceive, even though if lawyers, judges and juries were replaced by stupid computer programs would remain undetectable.
I’d love to be corrected by one of the lawyers on the board, because I’m also curious as to how this might go down.