Pretending to be caring, compassionate, and often Christian, your run-of-the-mill fortune teller, spiritual advisor, psychic, or whatever they want to call themselves, only want one thing: to relieve you of your money.
Many people who get sucked into the psychic lairs do it just for fun. After all, an initial reading is only ten bucks. But, before they know it, they give the fortune teller $100, and then thousands.
Never give them a penny. Even a "fun" $10 reading supports a criminal enterprise.
Fortune tellers are adept at gathering information from you in a casual conversation. Then they turn it around and give it back to you in a way that you think that they somehow came up with it in the first place. Sometimes they just read between the lines of what you tell them.
They also intimately know human nature, and the weaknesses, fears, and troubles we all share. When a person hears something from a pyschic that strikes a cord in them, and they think that the pyschic must indeed be gifted, they're ready to go down the slippery slope.
At Sherlock Investigations, we've had clients who have given fortune tellers $50,000 in a year's time, and even $150,000 in a year-and-a-half. Now, these are educated, intelligent people. However, the pyschic found something in them, a weakness, maybe a need or want to believe.
Victims come to us ashamed, humiliated, and desperate. In most cases, the money is never returned, and the fortune teller escapes. Only when less than 24 hours have passed have we been able to get a victim's money back.
We've had other cases where our clients said a pyschic told them who committed certain crimes. The other day, a man called to say that he knew who murdered someone in a case where a large reward was offered. As we sometimes act as a go-between in cases where someone is afraid to come forward with knowledge of a crime, we were very interested....until he told us that he was himself a psychic, and he learned the name of the murderer through his special powers. Well, we couldn't jeopardize our credibility with the FBI with information like this, so we let it drop.
To learn more about gypsy psychic scams, go to www.gypsypsychicscams.com. This is an excellent site that offers help to victims, and exposes psychics all over the country.
Finally, a well-known New York magazine is working on a story about psychic rip-offs. If you're in New York City, and have had a bad experience with a fortune teller or psychic, and want to talk about it, please contact Sherlock Investigations.
