how to scam people

Continuing in the vein of previous posts that mention Scott Adams, who claims to be an expert in the art of persuasion (and who thus believes Trump will ride a landslide into the White House): I recently watched a YouTube vid on how scammers do their thing. It was both enlightening and disgusting, mainly because the trick used is so easy and obvious.

Imagine you want to persuade people to invest large sums of money in you. To obtain their money, you devise a scheme that will make you look like a stock-market guru. Here's how you do it: start with 10000 potential victims. Tell half of them you're sure the market will be going up in the short term; tell the other half the opposite. Once the market twitches, stop focusing on the half that received the wrong prediction. For the remaining 5000 victims, tell half that the market will go up, and half that the market will go down. Repeat twice more. You'll now have 625 potential investors who have seen you correctly predict the market four times in a row: you're a god! How easy will it be, then, to get their money?

"Bah," you say, because like many of my commenters, you're only interested in being contrary. "That won't work: the jilted people will talk with the true believers and tell them you've been wrong four times in a row!" Oho, you think so? On what do you base this assumption? That I was stupid enough to call 10000 people who all work on the same city block, or who all have interconnected LinkedIn profiles? Silly monkey.

It's a good scam. Maybe I should try it.