A copywriter swindled victims out of $200M by pretending to be a psychic
thewalrus.ca
thewalrus.ca
The prosecution's concluding remarks are a good statement about this:
> The prosecution concluded with a simple argument: “We all have beliefs,” lawyer Charles Dunn told the jury. “You may think my beliefs are crazy. I could have the same opinion about your beliefs. We may think other people are foolish for what they believe. That’s okay. That’s not a crime. What’s not okay is taking advantage of people because of what they believe. What’s not okay is lying to them because you think they’re a fool. And it is criminal, it is a crime when you lie to them about their beliefs and take their money.”
In the end you're buying something that doesn't exist. If you want to believe it exists that's fine. Complaining that you bought magic and someone sold you fake magic though? C'mon now. The fake predictions were just as real as the real ones would be.
You can't say "Well I thought I was getting REAL magic", because that doesn't exist. You can absolutely say "Well I thought I was getting a REAL car", because it's expected to buy a car, and cars exist.
And Maria Duval exists, so it's possible that a bespoke letter from her to you could exist, even if you don't believe the contents.
Feels more like saying — if you went to Disneyland & bought a ticket for "Get your photo taken with Mickey Mouse: $20", would you accept a photo with any random person instead because "of course you can't get a photo with Mickey Mouse, he doesn't exist"?
"Buying magic from Maria Duval" changes it to fraud assuming that Maria Duval was not involved. Where things become slightly more tricky is that Maria Duval sold the rights to her name to the scam operators before they did the scam.
So now the analogy is maybe "you paid for an autograph from Mickey Mouse, but Joe Schmo signed it instead (you didn't find out until later). Disney sold the rights for Joe Schmo to use the name Mickey Mouse in autographs."
Mickey Mouse as a character does exist btw, as a point that doesn't matter much.
But I wouldn't be surprised if you could get into legal trouble selling autograph books that you signed yourself, presenting them as being collector's items from Disney.
But really, the thing you'd be making is functionally identical to what you'd get at the park - it's a fictional character's signature, drawn by a person trained in making that signature.
Right, I don't think someone selling something under licence is a problem/fraud, but if it's a key part of the "product" that you're buying is the provenance as well as the content, then that's what makes it fraud. From the article:
> Some correspondence directed recipients to purchase supposedly supernatural objects, while others urged them to use provided green envelopes to mail personal items—family photographs, palm prints, locks of hair—against a promise that the psychic would use them to conduct personalized rituals. “Once this envelope has been sealed, it may be opened ONLY by me,” read one letter that included Duval’s photocopied signature.
You're buying a service where you send in a personal item, it will only be opened by Duval and she'll conduct a personalised reading. Actually, your personal item is getting binned & you're getting a templated response from someone else (if you get any response at all).
Disney Corporation is fine to sell photos of Mickey Mouse with Walt Disney's signature on it or to licence Joe Schmo to do it for them.
But if they said "Original preparatory sketch by Walt Disney, signed by the man himself" and sold it for $10k and it turns out it's a reproduction signed by Joe Schmo, then that's a problem.
Let's say I believe in unicorns. Is it legal to then glue a horn on a horse and sell it to me as a "unicorn"?
I think it was this level of effort to deceive about their abilities, as well as the clear evidence that Maria did not write the letters or engage with the received items, that sunk any claim that people ‘knew’ what they were buying into.
It would be quite wild if people were to take present day money techniques with modern LLMs and create this thing wildly. After all, if you cast a wide enough net you'll get some people who will believe!
This is redundant.
Yes, all psychics can be seen as committing a kind of fraud, but most stay in their unfalsifiable lane. This psychic used the mail to advertise health services. They didn't just claim to predict the future or sending good energy into the universe, which you can still legally charge for. They claimed to be able to cure diseases in exchange for a fee, which is fraud, and they did it over the mail. But then they rebutted that they were basically selling the placebo effect, which is kind of real... it makes for a much more interesting case than your comment makes it seem.
When did you first realize that you have the Gift of premonition?
They tricked people into paying for communications that were supposedly from a specific, real person. The letters they received did not actually contain communications from that person.
Fraud requires intention of missleading.
Also, what most customers want, is emotional comfort. And whatever we think of it, it seems to work for them. Even though personally, I'll go with south parks take on it:
You still got your book. These people got their psychic readings. Just from a different source.
Can you prove that the different source was of lower quality, for something that you can't prove quality for in the first place?
It reminds me of famous artists where a lot of their work was done by assistants.
Should I be able to sue a celebrity when their autobiography was ghostwritten but that wasn't publicly disclosed? Or when their tweet is written by a publicist? We seem to have decided the answer to that is no.
I ordered a cat scratcher. Cat scratchers are perfectly commodity things.. but mine wasn't. I ordered a handmade one. What I got shipped was a repurchase from Wayfair.
I sent a single picture of the box and got a full refund.
Yes, I got a cat scratcher but the handmade part was a material term of the deal.
Paying someone to do a psychic reading is not buying a paragraph of text. You are buying an action.
If you hire someone to tweet original tweets on your behalf and they just use a bot to retweet random clever sayings... they have in fact engaged in fraud!
I'm glad you brought up the paragraph of text because are literally buying a fictional paragraph. It can say anything and will still be a psychic reading.
I'm struggling to understand how you can equate something that isn't real and something that's tangible.
You think on this for a while and decide that instead of drawing a Blorgen, you are going to grab a random Google image and send it to me. That's fraud.
But let's say you draw the Blorgen instead. What's a Blorgen? No idea. Maybe you draw a lizard person. Maybe it's an abstract piece.
Even if you and I disagree on what a Blorgen is, the situation is no longer fraud.
If I hire you to do a psychic reading for me and you decide to get naked, walk around a bonfire 3 times and then stream of consciousness pronounce whatever is in your head.. great. You did the commission.
Even if your psychic fortune is "electric badgers like rock n roll radio", man, I have some issues but fraud ain't one.
Psychic predictions are never psychic predictions because psychic predictions don't exist.
Nobody in the universe can give you a psychic prediction.
Of course they also told me how upset they were to hire a white man, something I wish they had mentioned Before hiring. so that kind of set the tone.
I also wanted a cat scratcher with a perch on top so my oldest can sit at the same height as the dining room table - he likes sitting near me at meals but I also don't want him on the table.
So yeah I needed a cat scratcher with a certain base size and a specific height and have no interest in a woodworking project. Instead I just wanted to pay $50 to have someone else make it.
(The other cat scratchers I buy are $70 a pop so really not a cost issue. At that point you get a cat scratcher that lasts 5+ years, looks nice and is big enough my cats will actually use it)
And they got one.
>and from someone who they thought was a psychic
And that person provided one. How he procured it should be of no consequence.
The procurement was part of the agreed-upon conditions of the sale, so it is.
It doesn't matter that Barack is a certified reader, or that psychic readings are real or fake, or anything else - you didn't give me what I purchased.
Sidenote, something doesn't have to be a formally-drafted lawyer contract to be a contract, either. It's just an agreement. Like one where I buy something you offer and I expect that to be the thing that you offered me
It is legal for scientology to solicit donations from their followers. It's even legal for the Catholic Church to solicit tithes. If the party benefitting believes their own story then quite a lot seems to be legal.
Is that it? Is the lack of overt signal they "believed" what makes this bad because I would suggest, they were a clever psychic who did what all psychics did, they just did it better.
"We will use our special|professional|proprietary|psychic knowledge of the market in order to make your product sell better"
On the one hand marketing is critical for any business, they do need to sell things after all. On the other, the marketing group is really good at selling things, most importantly themselves, that is, selling how good they are at selling things.
It's a bit silly to trust the first psychic you come across, I sure wouldn't do it.
I probably wouldn't trust the 2nd.. or th- nevermind.. you get it. If you don't, consult a psychic.
If your church turns out not to even be a church, but a copywriting scam, and you donated to it, you should sue.
This is not a case where someone is being discriminated against unlawfully because they consider Psychic Reading to be their religion, which is what laws would traditionally protect against.
Maybe the defendant could try to say that the victims (for lack of a less leading word) were just practicing the religion and, if they agreed, maybe that's actually what happened. That doesn't appear to be what happened.
A lot of people spend their lives making money without actually living though.