Thursday, June 1, 2017

Another Bad Psychic

In Monday's post I commented that using magick to make a living was pretty difficult. Magick can certainly help you do better and make more money at whatever you do, but it's no substitute for regular work. Now there is one exception to that rule of thumb, but I don't recommend it. You can become a fraudulent psychic. Fraudulent psychics can make big money, at least until they get caught by the authorities.

Detectives say their investigation began in November of 2016, when the first victim, a 33-year-old a military veteran, approached detectives during a fraud awareness seminar hosted by the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office.

The man reported he had been scammed by 31-year-old Gina Wilson. He began seeing her in 2015 to help with “emotional distress.” According to the sheriff’s office, Wilson told the man to stop taking his prescribed medications, alter his bank accounts and to stop seeing his therapist and doctor. The victim says he paid Wilson approximately $92,000 before he realized he was being scammed.

During the investigation detectives, learned of a second alleged victim, a 61-year-old Palm Harbor woman, who began seeing Wilson for help with her grief after her husband passed away. PCSO says Wilson assured the woman that she could help her late husband “pass over to the other side.”

The victim says when Wilson asked for a large sum of money to perform a ceremony at the grave site, she realized she was being scammed and contacted authorities.

No legitimate alternative healer, let alone a legitimate psychic, is ever going to tell you to stop taking medication or ceasing conventional medical treatment. If they do, they're probably fraudulent. This applies to faith healers and the like as well. Since magick manipulates probability, it's going to work better along with mundane steps such as conventional medication. With any sort of spell, you want more avenues of probability open for it to work, not less.

Also, money has no special magical significance besides simply being money. So even for a ritual that requires cash, the amount is never magically significant. From a ritual perspective, you can do the exact same thing with ten dollars as you can with thousands. One of the classic fake psychic scams is have a client bring some large sum of money for a ritual and make a show of burning it. The psychic uses some sort of stage magic trick so that the money is not actually burned, and then pockets it after the "ritual."

For the most part I find the capital-S Skeptics annoying, but this is one area in which they do good work - exposing frauds who are exploiting belief in magick and psychic powers to scam clients. Criminals like Wilson give both psychics and magicians a bad name.

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