An extreme oddity.

Today I got yet another email from the sibyl, and it has completely freaked me out. It read as follows:

Date: Thu, 6 Nov 2008 07:37:41 +0000
From: sybil.cumae@googlemail.com
To: sfwc@hotmail.com
Subject: I thought you might want to know...

When you read this email you will have 3 20p coins in your pocket. Toss one of them 30 times and you will get the sequence THTHHHHHTHTTTTHTTHTTTTHHTTHTTT.

I had 3 20p coins in my pocket and I tossed one 30 times. I got exactly that sequence of heads and tails. The chance of this is less than 1 in a billion. There's no way any scammer, however sophisticated, could beat those odds. Dedicated googling has turned up no information at all about where these emails could be coming from. I can think of no explanation. Maybe I'm going mad.

A worrying development.

I've been avoiding checking my inbox for a couple of days, but today I finally had a look. I've only had one email from the sibyl, which was as follows:

Date: Mon, 3 Nov 2008 00:17:24 +0000
From: sybil.cumae@googlemail.com
To: sfwc@hotmail.com
Subject: I thought you might want to know...

When you read this email you will be wearing glasses, beige trousers, a black T-shirt, a brown patterned jumper and gray boxer shorts. You won't be wearing shoes or socks.

This prediction is spot on, but I'm not sure what it means. How do they know what colour my underwear is? Is this supposed to be some kind of veiled threat? In any case, if they know so much about me then they almost certainly read this blog. If so, I'd like to make the following statement:

I did not buy a lottery ticket, and I do not believe anybody has the ability to forecast lottery results. I cannot and will not reimburse you for any money you have expended in the course of your scam. If you threaten me in any way or ask for money from me, I will contact the police.

The oddity again.

I've just had a look at the national lottery results from last night, and they matched the email from the sibyl. I guess this means that, if this is a scam, I'll soon be targeted. If I'm right in my guess about how the scam works then whoever is running it has lost a reasonable amount of money and is hoping to make it back from me. Of course, all of this is built on a tissue of conjectures which I'm now beginning to hope are false. I'm not really sure what to do; I need to take a little time to think.

The oddity explained.

I've continued to get odd emails from sybil.cumae. I've worked out where the name comes from (By the power of google!!). It seems that there was a mythical oracle called the Cumaean sibyl, about whom there are various legends. I guess this is a sidelong claim that the content of the emails is true. This isn't my only discovery, though. In fact, I now reckon I know what's going on, as I'll explain in a minute.

Although the emails are starting to get a little longer, they are still terse by comparison with other emails. I've started to enjoy getting them; it's fun to check the random odd facts, which are beginning to be a little more interesting, and introduce me to areas I wasn't aware of. A disproportionate number deal with mathematical facts, though, and I think I've finally found one email which is in error:

Date: Tue, 28 Oct 2008 09:59:25 +0000
From: sybil.cumae@googlemail.com
To: sfwc@hotmail.com
Subject: I thought you might want to know...

Any even integer greater than 2 is a sum of two primes.

This is, of course, the Goldbach conjecture. The reason it is called a conjecture is that, although it is widely believed to be true, nobody knows of any way to prove it. I guess whoever is researching the facts in the emails didn't do their homework properly.

However, the content of the email that has finally cleared up this whole mess was as follows:

The winning numbers in the UK national lottery lotto game on Saturday 1st November 2008 will be 18, 19, 25, 30, 33 and 43.

Of course, there is only one way to reliably predict such things in advance: The emails I've been getting are part of an elaborate 'football picks' scam. The way that this usually works is that letters or emails are sent out to (initially huge numbers of) victims with betting tips about who will win particular football matches. For each match, about half of the victims are told that each team will win. Of course, this means that a lot of incorrect predictions are made. Any victim to whom an incorrect prediction has been sent will be abandoned. Eventually, there will be a very small number of victims left, for each of whom all of the predictions so far have been correct.

All that any of these victims are aware of is the sequence of correct predictions which has been sent to them. So they think that the tipsters are giving sound advice. Playing on this mistake, the tipster contacts these victims offering to give further tips in return for a fee, now that their expertise has been 'demonstrated'. The victims pay the fee hoping to win their money back by gambling on the basis of the tips they are given. The tipster, no longer caring whether the victims win or lose, disappears with the fee. Something of this kind was the basis for Derren Brown's 'the System'.

This scam has now become rather well known, (even referenced in 'the Simpsons'), so that running it in this iterative way has become impractical. Accordingly, the scammers who are sending me these emails have modified it to make it less recognisable in at least three ways:

• Numerous other, easy to obtain, facts are also sent. This encourages the user (me) to check those facts, and to imagine that that whoever is sending them has researched all of them. This subtly hides the fact that the final 'fact' is not researched at all.
• All the eggs are put in one basket: Only one prediction (of lottery results) is made, but the prediction is improbable enough to be highly convincing. This removes the repeated predictions which are a giveaway for the usual scam.
• I'm not completely certain about this last point, but it is rather likely. The chances of winning the lottery are about 1 in 14 million, and there are only 60 million people in the UK, so normally to pull this off the scammers would have to email about one person in four. Nobody I've spoken to is getting similar emails, so I think it is very unlikely that they have done so. Instead, my guess is that they have covered the numbers they didn't send by placing a bet on the results of this weeks lottery draw betting that none of their predictions were right.

I've worked out the numbers for this last point and I reckon it could be done. For example, they may have placed a bet of £100,000 that none of the numbers will be 25, thus reducing the number of people they must email to about 1.7 million, which is a much more manageable number (I'd guess about double this number were emailed to give the system some slack). If none of the numbers are 25, then they win their bet and so make a profit of about £14,000. Otherwise, they have lost £100,000 which they must recoup from somebody they have emailed. But one or two of the victims believe that they can predict lottery numbers (and may even have won) and will now be squeezed in the hopes of recouping the lost £100,000 together with a large profit. The money involved here is not precise: It can be scaled up or down depending on the resources available to the scammers and how much they think they can practically squeeze out of the victims.

Needless to say, I haven't bought a ticket.

An oddity.

I've been getting some very odd emails, which I can't really explain. Here's a typical example:

Date: Mon, 13 Oct 2008 11:52:04 +0100
From: sybil.cumae@googlemail.com
To: sfwc@hotmail.com
Subject: I thought you might want to know...

Alaska is the largest state in the USA.

Others (from the same address and with the same subject line) have had similarly terse content:

• The 500th digit of pi after the decimal point is 2.
• The reciprocal of the fine structure constant is about 137.036
• Gray whales migrate at an average speed of 3 mph.
• King George III of the United Kingdom died on a Saturday.

I've checked these statements (wikipedia is my friend) and they all seem to be accurate. I can't see anything else they have in common. And I have no idea why anyone would send them to me. I don't know anyone called anything like Sybil Cumae. They don't have any kind of attachments that could be harbouring viruses. I've tried telling hotmail that messages from sybil.cumae@googlemail.com are junk, but it still puts them in my inbox. I'm beginning to suspect that this is some kind of viral marketing thing for a microsoft product, but I haven't heard of anyone else getting similar emails and I can't find any reference to it online.

I'm stumped.