A lot of these comments are jumping to victim-blaming, but the headline doesn't really describe the fraud. The article says the fraud they were prosecuted for wasn't even for the "psychic" services. The fraudster took a famous psychic's likeness and purported to be selling interactions with her, when in fact the letters were being destroyed and the responses were mass produced copy. Obviously "psychics" aren't real, but that doesn't mean anyone committing fraud around psychic services gets a free license to swindle customers.
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.”
I mean, I have zero issue with ideological fools having their money legally seperated and repatriated to the grifters, it is not against the law (per se) to tell people what they want to hear and take on their cause no matter how disingenuously. But if you are lying and not fulfilling your side of any exchange, obviously that is illegal or at least legally actionable, as it should be.
One can read the article and read the prosecution's argument and still disagree with it. I do.
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.
How does this compare to someone selling you a car that doesn't exist? It's criminal, and very similar if you distance your beliefs around magic from it.
A car can exist, though. That's the big difference.
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.
> 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"?
Got it. Reading the thread it's more about the idea of "buying magic", which is nonsense.
"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.
> 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."
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.
Authenticity is an interesting thing to think about. When we went to Disney, there's a thing where you can get signatures from the cast members. The actress playing Cinderella would sign my kids' little book in the way you might think Cinderella would, Tinkerbell would sign the book in the way you might think Tinkerbell would, etc.
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.
That’s the thing though, what people believe they’re getting and the intent of the purveyor makes all the difference. For example, if you’re an atheist, then all of religion would amount to so much mumbo jumbo to you, but that doesn’t mean all religious organizations are free to commit fraud of any kind without consequence.
The HN title is inaccurate. He didn't simply pretend to be psychic, but rather pretended to be one particular psychic, fraudulently using their name and image for profit.
This article doesn’t make clear the most important part of the scandal: the letters contained information that was unique to the recipient, to allow them to believe that maybe the psychic was legit. They didn’t use standard, mass copywriting techniques; they leveraged newspapers and, later, consumer information databases to share info about people that no “stranger” should have known.
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 is interesting to note that some states (NY comes to mind) have anti-fortune telling laws on the books. I'll refrain from commenting on the validity of those laws. Likely they are forgotten and unenforced.
What's fascinating to me about this whole thing is that the original woman used a couple of hits to cultivate an audience and then sold that image onwards. She's like a modern day influencer/creator/brand marketer. Fascinating.
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!
The moment I read the headline, I was expecting to find a bunch of low-effort comments that don't engage with the article, which actually speaks directly to this issue. Congrats.
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.
The fraudsters were pretending to be someone else, who claimed to be a psychic.
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.
Plenty of people think that they are psychic. We all think, at least on some dumb lizard-brained level, that we can continue to steer the bowling ball after it's been released.
Is this really a swindle if your "victims" are willing participants? Every purported psychic is "pretending" even if they don't realise. My sister in law makes good money giving readings over zoom. She genuinely believes in this nonsense, as do her customers. Is there a practical difference though, whether she believes it or not?
The victims paid for personal readings from a specific person, and got mass-produced ones from someone else instead. Psychics are bullshit, but that's an extra level of fraud on top, and far more actionable by law enforcement.
I'm reminded of Robert Tilton, who was exposed for depositing/trashing prayer requests/donations without actually praying over them. Sadly it seems like he largely escaped intact. I suspect being a grifter is a very strong risk factor for being too lazy to grift 'correctly', no matter how easy it would be.
If someone sells a good or service, knowing they will fail to deliver, they're committing fraud. Whether one believes in prayer or not should not apply in the judgment.
My point is that people are saying the fraudulent aspect of his crime is that he didn’t actually pray. It wouldn’t have made a difference to their lives. Churches swindle millions of people out of billions of dollars annually.
Sounds like shuffling a deck of cards and then selecting cards from the deck at random. It's redundant. Fraudulent fraud gets collapsed into just fraud, which is what the customer wanted from the start.
They paid for a psychic reading, and from someone who they thought was a psychic. They weren't paying for psychic powers to be real. If I buy a book on psychic readings, is it alright for them not to send it to me because psychic readings aren't real? Is it "redundant?"
It's more like you ordered a book on Amazon, but it was shipped from Wal-Mart instead.
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.
Ah but psychic readings are personal comissions, not mass marketable!
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!
Oh, so my cats are all insanely big cats. I don't mean fat, I mean big. They knock over cat scratchers all the time (and then go on to scratch other things like furniture).
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)
Nobody has the ability to give you a psychic reading because psychic readings don't exist.
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.
I pay you to produce for me a drawing of a Blorgen.
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.
If you advertise personal readings for me by Barack Obama, and I buy a personal reading from Barack Obama, and I get a reading from someone who is not Barack Obama, the product delivered was not the product purchased.
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
If both believe in it and fulfil their bargain, it is not fraud.
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:
If they find out, definitely. And if they don't find out, I would think yes, as they subconsciously probably notice some things are off with the intention of the "psychic".
not really. a “psychic reading” may not be supernatural, but it is still advice from a person. in this case they advertised advice from a specific person, but sold advice from a different person.
>She genuinely believes in this nonsense, as do her customers. Is there a practical difference though, whether she believes it or not?
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.
Willfully and knowingly defrauding someone is worse, yeah. Also giving "readings" and making vague comments / giving advice is very different from promising health outcomes.
I'm somewhat bemused by the idea what they did, is morally any different to what any psychic does. The assumption appears to be a psychic genuinely believes they have insights into you as an individual based on some criteria.
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.
The mind-blowing thing to me, besides the scam is that there is a $200M market out there for the actual psychic to exploit legitimately, that could be entirely automated by AI.
How is this different from any other type of marketing?
"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.
Practically speaking, they charged for a service with given parameters -- So-and-so will perform the reading personally -- and did not appropriately deliver on the purchased service.
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.
If you pay your religion for a religious service, and they fail to do it, you should sue. If you book a wedding at a church, they can't just call off the wedding and not give your money back.
If your church turns out not to even be a church, but a copywriting scam, and you donated to it, you should sue.
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.”