Online gambling is a huge industry, with many different casinos fighting hard to grab marketshare from their internet competitors. So, it’s perhaps not a surprise to find that some gambling websites are using some ingenious schemes to try and encourage people to visit them.
Take the following spam email I received, for instance.
It pretends to be a reply to an email which I never sent (my guess is that they’re hoping that I as a recipient will simply think the reply has been accidentally sent to me instead of the correct address).
It contains details of what is claimed to be a betting system that will mean “you can win everytime” at roulette:
Sounds too good to be true, doesn’t it? And if you’re a gullible type you might race off to the gambling website it links to, in order to try out this allegedly foolproof system for breaking the casino at roulette.
Unfortunately, however, the system doesn’t work. A quick spot of Googling revealed to me that the trick seems remarkably like the Martingale roulette system, which suggests that gamblers double their bet after every loss in the hope that an eventual win will recoup all of the money they have squandered so far.
The spam is also somewhat incorrect in saying that you have a 50/50 chance of the red or black colour you bet on coming up trumps. Seeing as roulette wheels have a green zero (and I believe in America also a double-zero), this is clearly not true.
But how inventive for this casino to try and fool punters into betting with them online, under the pretence of a scheme designed to break the casino’s bank.
* Image source: John Wardell’s Flickr photostream (Creative Commons)
