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Summary: SPAM BULLETIN www.virusbtn.com
FEBRUARY 2008S2
PREDICTIONS ABOUT THE
PREDICTION SCAM
Sampson Pun, Eric Parsons, Margaret Nielsen,
David Ma and John Aycock
University of Calgary, Canada
Many traditional confidence games have made their way
into electronic form. Witness the humble advance fee
fraud, for example, dating back to before Jack the Ripper's
time [1, 2] and now flourishing in large volumes thanks
to the magic of spam. One scam that is conspicuous by its
electronic absence, however, is the prediction scam.
The prediction scam works like this. A scammer picks an
event with a typically binary result, such as a sports event:
win or lose. Starting from a pool of (say) 32 people, the
scammer contacts half the people and predicts one result,
predicting the opposite result to the other half. The event
occurs, and the scammer must have given the correct
prediction to 16 people. Those 16 are now split into two
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