How scammers outsmart people by predicting stock market trends and cryptocurrency prices

So email scams are pretty common occurrences. If you’ve had an email address for a long time you’ve probably received an email telling you that you’re one of the lucky recipients of the latest iPhone or a hundred thousand dollars. Whilst some people fall for these types of scams – these aren’t the most sophisticated.

A more sophisticated scam involves people who claim to be able to predict cryptocurrency or stock exchange markets and I came to know of this type of scam on from a YouTube channel I subscribed to called Simply Explained.

Whilst in Zimbabwe, it’s highly unlikely that you’ll receive a stock exchange email, you may receive one regarding how to predict cryptocurrency markets and you may actually receive an email that turns out to correctly predict how the price of Bitcoin is going to rise or fall in a certain period.

How are they scammers if they correctly predict this trend you ask? Well, here’s how they do it.

A scammer will set out with an email list of (e.g) 300 000 people and he/she will divide that list into 3. They will proceed to make 3 predictions i.e Bitcoin price will rise/fall/stagnate to the 3 different groups.

This means for a one of these groups (100k people) a certain outcome will be true. The scammer then follows this up by splitting these into yet another group of 3 (33k each this time) and makes another prediction. Again 33 000 people will get a correct prediction and if the scammer decides to do this again 11 people will get another correct prediction.

At this point a random person in your email would have made what seems like 4 correct predictions about the stock/cryptocurrency market in a row and you might actually begin to think they are a guru when in fact they are just guessing.

After this the scammer then sends an email suggesting that the next piece of advice will need to be paid for and because they’ve built this trust a number of people will decide to part with the money to get what they believe is expert advice.

PS: This article was heavily inspired by Simply Explained’s video on the same topic. Please check it out and leave a like or comment so it reaches as many people as possible and as he suggests – don’t go out and start scamming people with this knowledge.