[Tuffty]

An idea for a forum scam that came to mind.

1) Choose a market that trades 24 hrs a day.
2) Post a thread in the middle of the night when there is low activity on a forum.
3) On that post I post a number of possible trades with targets on individual posts.
4) Pick the one that worked out well and edit all the other posts.
5) Point people in the direction of my web site where I will charge you money.
6) Do a runner.
7) While it may not be honest those people parting with money will learn a valuable lesson

No idea if it would work or not or if anybody has ever tried it or something similar. Its just something that came to mind after reading of a scam in the book ‘A Mathematician Plays the Market’ by John Allen Paulos.

[barjon]

Who's a naughty tuffty then 'Course you could always post a different selection of trades and targets on different boards under different nicks and then just concentrate on the board where the trade worked out. You probably hope that wouldn't turn out to be T2W 'cos the scambusters will get you

Shall we go into business?

good trading

jon

[GammaJammer]

How about - pick a day when there's likely to be carnage (payrolls), post a trade reccomendation in a dark deserted corner of a site (the lounge or something). Wait for the carnage to settle, then edit it a bit to make it reflect the exact turning points in cable or whatever (with plausible reasons why etc), then pop up in the trading forum saying 'see, I told you so' with a link to your original (now nostradamus like) post.

[Tuffty]

The scam in the book involved 1000 people getting 10 consecutive correct calls on the direction of an index for 10 consecutive weeks. Impressive.

Of course the scam started with 64,000 letters going out, half of which said the index would go up, the other down. The next week you'd send out 32,000 letter to the same people who got the correct call and so on.

By the end you've got 1000 real believers (I think I'd be one of them too). You could charge them $1000 for your service no problem and make yourself $1m.

If you were a very clever scammer you may add this sort of thing onto the sort of scam mentioned above if one had obtained a list of email addresses.

Do you want to add that in to the business plan barjon?

[donaldduke]

The simplest scam is to try and flog systems that have been overfitted to recent data.

These system look really good but in real trading perform nowhere near as good as
they did in backtesting (they normally give breakeven results or some cases even lose money).

The people selling these systems know they are garbage (if they are any good they
wouldnt be selling them).

[donaldduke]

Originally Posted by GammaJammer

How about - pick a day when there's likely to be carnage (payrolls), post a trade reccomendation in a dark deserted corner of a site (the lounge or something). Wait for the carnage to settle, then edit it a bit to make it reflect the exact turning points in cable or whatever (with plausible reasons why etc), then pop up in the trading forum saying 'see, I told you so' with a link to your original (now nostradamus like) post.

Or how about bomard the site with loads of threads and messages so when you do go
back and edit one of your posts, no one can remember what you orginally wrote. Also
edit about twenty other posts while youre at it.

[ChartMan]

You are BAD, VERY BAD.

[Tuffty]

I'm sorry Mr Moderator. It's just if the trading ever goes down the pan and I'm wondering where my next meal is going to come from.........