The “Can’t Miss” pick of the week:

An example of a scam utilizing the “truckload of pennies” principle

To start:• Without any insider knowledge, and without a

sense of ethics, you can probably make a good deal of money selling gambling advice.

• Here’s how to start: select any given sporting event on which it is legal to gamble (say, an NFL game). Send out your “can’t miss pick of the week”, which is a prediction of the outcome of that game. Make sure to send out plenty of these. Attached to the “can’t miss pick…” include a way for the recipient to purchase a whole week’s predictions from you.

The setup:

• For half of your mailing list, send a prediction that (e.g.) the Vikings will beat the Packers.

• To the other half, send a prediction that the Packers will beat the Vikings.

• Then, after the game is played, it is unlikely that you’ll get any subscriptions from the unsuccessful half, but maybe you will from the successful half.

The scam:

• Now, take only the successful half of your mailing list, and make another prediction for the following week, sending one outcome to one half and the other outcome to the other half, as before.

• Now, to ¼ of your original mailing list, you are a perfect 2-0. The more times you are able to repeat this, the more successful a small portion of your list believes you to be, and with every iterated success, you have that much greater a likelihood of gaining their money for your whole week’s picks.

The Moral:

• Of course I do not encourage this kind of manipulative behavior.

• Rather let this be a warning to you that this is the kind of thing that you must be on the lookout for so as not to be fooled out of your own money.

• In this day and age, with email, it takes no overhead at all to run this scam.