Woman makes $420k by buying insurance on flights she predicted would get delayed

Re:Woman makes $420k by buying insurance on flights she pred... by paulkre on Monday June 15, 2020 @05:50AM (#23525595)

I wonder how she predicted so accurately which flights would be delayed.

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Re:Woman makes $420k by buying insurance on flights she pred... by netsharc on Monday June 15, 2020 @06:20AM (#23525795)

She probably wasn't super accurate about it, because the article also says she would try to get the tickets refunded if the flight ended up not getting delayed.

Maybe the insurers didn't have sophisticated algorithms, and her prediction was something like: For example on Flightradar24, etc, you could see that a particular plane on a particular date maybe flew New York - Austin, then Austin - Boston and then Boston - New York. On the next day it might be the same or a different plane. On the next day you'd just have to see if the NY - Austin flight is delayed, and you could deduce that since the airline usually uses 1 plane to do the 3 above routes, that plane will be delayed for the Austin - Boston and Boston - New York routes...

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Re:Woman makes $420k by buying insurance on flights she pred... by readarticle on Monday June 15, 2020 @05:55AM (#23525622)

But instead of getting onto the flights herself, Li was making use of her past travel service work experience to selectively take out insurance on flights that she thought would be delayed.

The Paper, citing Yangtse Evening Post, said she was able to receive relevant information beforehand that tells her if the flight was going to be delayed or cancelled.

3rd and 4th paragraphs of the article.

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Re:Woman makes $420k by buying insurance on flights she pred... by wolfgang42 on Monday June 15, 2020 @09:36AM (#23527140)

“receive relevant information” doesn’t really adequately answer the question of how.

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Re:Woman makes $420k by buying insurance on flights she pred... by heedlessly3 on Monday June 15, 2020 @10:46AM (#23527858)

it's possible she was in talks with a co-worker who gave her insider info

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Re:Woman makes $420k by buying insurance on flights she pred... by unishark on Monday June 15, 2020 @06:40AM (#23525909)

My guess is she took advantage of times when the airlines hadn't announced the delay yet but had no chance of making it on time. Then occasionally got burned when they switched planes or something and cancelled a different flight instead.

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