Scammers being scammed

Online news outlet Vice reported recently about a growing problem of witches, psychics and tarot card readers having their online profiles copied as a way to steal their business. I also found an episode of the “Your Magic” podcast where host Michelle Tea talks with Sarah Potter, Sabrina Scott and others about the problem:

https://open.spotify.com/episode/3Q5lBiOlKv6XkASLNnQqEr

As I was reading through the Vice article, there was quite a lot that really stood out to me as lacking in any kind of introspection.

In an unintentionally ironic quote, Michelle Tea said of the scammers' fake business: “It's not what you paid for. It's just unethical, period”. Of course, this is no different from what Michelle is doing - she promises one thing to her customers, the ability to read their future, or offer spiritual guidance, but what she actually delivers is just advice that she makes up, based on listening to her clients (and maybe checking out their Facebook accounts beforehand for some background information). Basically these people are just cold reading, or even hot reading, their clients in order to con them into thinking they have special abilities. It's all a sham.

Apparently these online psychics who use Instagram and Facebook are also unhappy that the mechanisms for reporting scammers are ineffective. Tarot reader Hannah Graves said reporting the accounts as fake doesn't work, and that the only thing that works, reporting all of the images and posts that the scammers use to impersonate them for copyright infringement, is “way too time-consuming and not effective”. I reckon they should be thankful that this is the case, as it's likely their own business would be struck down if these platforms had complaints procedures that actually worked, and had proper standards in place to ensure people aren't selling a service they don't deliver on.

Grace Kredell, who is somehow writing a master's thesis about psychic abilities, said “I think what's really disheartening too for practitioners is how many people fall for it”. I don't think this should be too surprising to them - given that psychic abilities have never been proven to be real, and that the customers of these psychics are already falling for a set of tricks, it's not too hard to imagine that they'd also fall for a scammer pretending to be a psychic. All psychics are scammers who are just pretending to be psychic, even if some of them don't realise that's what they're doing.

Hilariously, because these protections aren't effective enough, online witches are using their magic to fix the problem. A witch called Kiki told a journalist from Vice that they are using their magical abilities to protect themselves, including performing “a ceremony to protect us from being scammed”. The fact that these scams are not just still happening, but by the sounds of things getting worse, suggests that maybe their abilities aren't as real as they think they are.

Although most of the scammers are content to take people's money in advance and never deliver, apparently at least one scammer has been following through and giving readings to people after taking their money. One client of Michelle Tea said that “the scammer gave me a good reading”. This might speak to how fake the entire psychic industry is, that scammers pretending to be psychics can do as good a job as the “real” psychics do.