Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM wrote:
"Igor 'FUCK MNE HARDER' Chudov @ home" <ichudov@algebra.com> writes: Instead of "Boris", Igor will substitute one of the 8 newsletter names; instead of Adobe, he can use any volatile stock that's as likely to go up as down; and the predicted stock price movement will be "up" in the first four newsletters and "down" in the other four.
One month later the stock in question is either up or down. Without loss of generality, suppose that it's gone down. Aleksej, Boris, Vasilij, and Grigorij's investment advice was wrong, they disappear from the face of the earth, and the former recipients of their newsletters don't get bothered any more. (Or they could be recycled for future scams; or they could be send the remaining 2 issues of worthless advice, as promised.) On the other hand Dmitrij, Elena, Zhenja, and Zoya guessed right, so this time they send out a new investment newsletter via the anonymous remailers:
"Congratulations! You continue to receive the free investment advice newsletter from Zoya in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Last month I correctly predicted that Adobe will have gone down. If you're smart, you've shorted Adobe's stock and made lots of money by now. This month I predict that Cisco will go _down as well."
Again, Dmitrij and Elena predict that some other volatile stock goes up, while Zhenja and Zoya predict that it goes down. Suppose D&E are right. Igor leaves the Zh.&Z. partitions alone. One month later D&E's subscribers get letter #3:
"Congratulations! You continue to receive the free investment advice newsletter from Elena in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Two months ago I predicted that Adobe would go down. I hope you sold it short. Last month I predicted that Cisco would go up. I hope you bought it. This month I predict that Lucent will go _up."
One month later one of the two is right, so its recipients get the fourth and final e-mail from an anonymous remailer, this time using a reply block:
"I've given you three free stock tips over the last 3 months which probably made you a lot of money. Now that you've seen my track record, you'll want to continue receiving my free advice, but the free promotion is over. Please send $20 in untraceable digital cash to this reply block to receive 6 future issues."
Quite a few people would risk the $20, but that would be the last they hear from Igor. :-)
(Alternatively, he can even e-mail 6 more issues of worthless advice to those who caughed up the $20, so they can't complain. It would be hard to prosecute Igor without proving that all 8 newsletters were published by the same person who's been giving contradictory advice to different people.)
I can send all newsletters signed by myself, but claim that they are produced by different numerical models for predicting (or derivatives') returns. This way, even though I send out contradictory advice, I could always say that I had several experimental programs. It seems though that the market for advise newsletter has been saturated by people who give random advices and hope to hit a jackpot, like Garzarelli did with her "sell" advice before the '87 crash. So my letters would be hardly noticed. - Igor.