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There was a feeling of exhilaration and excitement on Twitter, with the Twitter account @FifNdhs called “FIFA Corruption” seemingly having predicted the final result of the World Cup final hours ahead of time.

FifNdhas tweets

The amazing German footballer Mario Götze scored the game’s only goal in the 113th minute, as his nation became the first European team to win a World Cup in South America.

The Twitter account in question has gained 40,000 followers and even caught the attention of broadcaster Matt Le Tissier since Götze’s goal. Many of my friends and local newspapers started talking and arguing about FIFA's worst scandal ever and its corruption.

@FifNdhs's tweets were broadcast on the 12th of July and the World Cup final was held on the 13th of July. How did this happen? Does it mean FIFA is corrupt?

George Chalhoub
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The account tweeted the components of every possible scenario ahead of time, then retrospectively deleted all the ones inconsistent with reality.

Many users have hinted that @FifNdhs has hidden his twitter profile before making it public.

Luckily, since his tweets were visible to many viewers, twitter user Suresh Nakhua actually managed to screenshot a bunch of the tweets before they were purged. (Suresh’s tweet)

enter image description here

This is actually a very good trick. If he kept his twitter profile private throughout the process, it may have been more difficult to solve this mystery.

Update:

According to this article and this one, @FifNdhs is not the only account who attempted to defame FIFA, as the Twitter user @FraudeMundial14 had earlier performed a similar trick, by actually predicting Argentina’s football group.

Tweeting in Spanish, the account started with:

We're going to make public Argentina’s group via this account.

In the same vein, neither is it our intention to ruin all of the expectations surrounding the World Cup draw, so we will only publish Argentina’s group.

And they did publish the group.

There are suggestions the account may have simply published all of Argentina’s group possibilities, and simply deleted the wrong ones; but there is no screenshot whatsoever of the wrong tweets who most likely got deleted.

People should have strong doubts or reservations so that they won't fooled by some social-media junkies.

March Ho
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George Chalhoub
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    I didn't know you could delete tweets. Good job getting the word out. FIFA might be corrupt, but we shouldn't take this shyster's word for it. –  Jul 15 '14 at 21:57
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    This is similar to a classic "stock pick advice" scam which relies heavily on confirmation bias, in which the scammer sends out a bunch of mail to people with every possible up-and-down change in a particlar stock symbol and expect only to get interest from the gullible people who happened to get the right one (or even near misses). – fluffy Jul 16 '14 at 07:14
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    This... is... devious. –  Jul 16 '14 at 14:05
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    Derren Brown did something similar a few years ago in a show called 'The System', he convinced people he had a system to win at horse racing, really worth a watch if you can find it online – JMK Jul 18 '14 at 14:13
  • [I'm not even mad](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=euI3v2jpTlI). – Michael Lorton Jul 20 '14 at 23:09
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    This explanation isn't 100% proven. I'm 99.9999% skeptical: I barely followed FIFA, and if FIFA was corrupt, why would this random guy know all the details, and beyond that, how would corruption be decided down to the last score, who scored it.. Corruption would be more along the lines of bad calls, unreasonable red cards, etc. But I'm just pointing out, if an organization as large as FIFA was uncovered to have somehow decided the outcome, they would certainly be capable of photoshopping those tweets. Just saying. A screenshot isn't great evidence. – J.Todd Jul 21 '14 at 06:03
  • @georgechalhoub, Yeah... I could think, already at the time of writing, about people would disagree with my way of telling you that you should be more skeptical about the "good" reputation of FIFA - you still got the point and edited your answer, much better now... Do "ad hominem" fallacies actually always work out? I deleted the "inappropriate" comment – Preexo Oct 29 '14 at 08:56
  • Sounds an awful lot like [The Sting](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0070735/) – Wayne Werner Jun 17 '16 at 14:37