Psychic Fraud: Is the victim ever to blame?
March 18th, 2010
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When it comes to self-proclaimed psychics, I tend to have a pretty low tolerance for these frauds and the acts they commit. Even if it might not always be a crime, it’s never ethically justifiable to lie to someone about what you can do to make money. When it comes to case of a desperate family of a missing child, it’s pretty clear that they are the not the ones to blame. In desperation, perhaps after days without sleep and willing to try anything on the chance that it could find a loved one, such individuals are prime targets for fraudulent psychics.
Yet there cases on the other end of the spectrum, where despite the psychic being a complete fraud, it’s almost hard not to laugh at the idiocy of the fool who was separated from their money.
Woman arrested over alleged psychic scam
POMPANO BEACH, Fla., March 17 (UPI) — Florida police say a professed psychic not only allegedly bilked a female client, but also convinced her to coat her body in gel and cellophane before jogging.
The Broward County Sheriff’s Office alleges Gina Marie Marks bilked the client of nearly $300,000 in cash and other items.
The South Florida Sun-Sentinel said Tuesday among the allegations made against Marks is that she convinced the client to give her thousands of dollars in gift cards to help prevent the client’s father from having a heart attack.
Marks, 37, is also accused of convincing the client, whose identity was not released, to perform a series of strange rituals, including coating her body in gel and cellophane before going for a six-mile jog.
The alleged events took place during a 19-month period that ended in February.
The Sun-Sentinel said Marks is charged with illegally obtaining property worth more than $50,000, grand theft and probation violations.
Oh hell, don’t even try to avoid laughing on this one. Enjoy it.
I suppose that one could call this an issue of having a cult-like level of control and manipulation, and there is some evidence for that, as apparently the woman’s family were desperate enough to hire a private investigator to put an end to this all. But… she covered herself with gel and cellophane and ran six miles. Granted, that is not the most destructive action she took, when compared to giving huge amounts of money to the psychic, but it is the wackiest.
In these cases, many times, the person who buys into the claims is mentally ill or has problems to some extent, although being crazy and an idiot are not mutually exclusive. Usually, the most extreme actions and demands made by the psychic are not made right away, but come after some less ridiculous ones, gradually pushing things further as time goes on.
How does one resolve the culpability in such cases? I think the best analogy to compare this to is the theft of a car that is left with the doors and windows open and the keys in the ignition in a very bad part of town at night. If you leave your car parked on the street in such a state, you can expect it to get stolen. That doesn’t mean that the car thief is any less responsible for stealing it – they still are should be prosecuted for the crime just as any other car thief, but you’re also a complete and utter idiot for allowing yourself to be so easily victimized. In fact, you may be considered so foolish that, although not criminally culpable, your insurance company could deny compensation on the grounds that you went out of your way to make your car easy to steal.
I would have loved to see this loser running in the gel and cellophane, though.
(And if anyone compares this to a woman wearing a short skirt being even slightly to blame for being raped or asking for it, I’m going to find you and punch you in the face. It’s not even close to the comparison above.)
This entry was posted on Thursday, March 18th, 2010 at 6:20 pm and is filed under Bad Science, Culture, Just LAME, Not Even Wrong, Paranormal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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March 18th, 2010 at 8:59 pm
Hard to tell in some cases for sure, but then again I can’t understand why intelligent individuals that present as rational in every other way will swallow religious dogma in the face of transparent logical errors, and glaring inconsistencies. In these cases often you will find that the party claiming special metaphysical knowledge and powers, is just as convinced of this as those that are being fooled into believing it is so.
People believe that sprinkling a bit of water on a baby’s head washes away some imaginary sin that the kid actually never committed. It’s not that big a leap to thinking that oiling themselves up, dressing in plastic rap and running a few miles will cure illnesses they don’t really have. Six of one, half a dozen of the other, in my opinion.
BTW, leaving your car unlocked on the street will earn you a $90 fine in my town – for encouraging criminal acts through negligence. I had to pay one about 15 years ago, to the high amusement of my wife, as I was always nagging her about leaving the car unlocked in the carport next to the house.
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March 18th, 2010 at 9:45 pm
ALL Psychics are frauds…and will continue to be until they can demo the ability in a positive way not some vague mumblings.
TOO many people accept things at face value and do not question it. So yes in this type of situation the ‘victim’ is at fault. The parents under normal circumstance may be 2-faced and say they aren’t sure about psychics, but under stress their real ‘belief’ will turn them to using the psychic. Especially when they are religious because they already believe in magic.
I am sorry about the situation they are in, but not about letting a fraud lead them down the wrong path…that is clearly THEIR fault. Psychics like religious people are perfect proof that just because the psychic BELIEVES the talent is real does not make it real.
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March 18th, 2010 at 11:12 pm
CybrgnX said:
You really think that ‘psychics’ like the woman who was getting the money off of this believe they have psychic powers? I think all or nearly all “professional psychics” and anyone who is into this enough to make money off of it is actually just lying and is fully aware that they are committing fraud.
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March 19th, 2010 at 1:36 am
Anyone who goes to a psychic and pays them for advice is being scammed. Usually it’s only for a few bucks per person, though. It’s only those dumb enough to go back over and over and spend many thousands who make the news.
Maybe someday education will lead to their source of revenue drying up when enough people become savy enough. I would not hold my breaht on it though.
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March 19th, 2010 at 3:49 am
A woman who dresses provotically is not of course asking to be raped. That’s absurd and insulting. But a woman (or to some extent a man) walking alone through an unlit alley or park in the dead of night in the dodgy part of town is not exatly doing everything he or she can to prevent it. This I would say is almost analogous (but not very). It doesn’t make the crime any less (horrifically) wrong.
Also a belief in God doesn’t necessitate a belief in magic. God is rational and anything which is not also rational is clearly wrong. A psychic or a magician is either a fraud or deluded.
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March 19th, 2010 at 3:51 am
Dave G said:
I spent most of yesterday reading comments from doctors describing events in A&E (the Emergency dept).
I wouldn’t hold your breath.
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March 19th, 2010 at 3:53 am
Lots of people are ridiculous easy to scam.
Was a case in Norway last week about a Nigerian who was giving away beer to people, he had said he a machine for copying money with regular paper, using a machine who was never shown. One fool ended up giving him 10.000$ for copying. I guess the Nigerian would keep some of the copied money and give the rest back.
Now if 1% of the US population would fall for an idiot scam it still gives you millions of targets. An idiot scam has many benefit over a pure fraud, it might be hard to prove it’s a actual crime, the victim would often be redundant to go to the police because the police would laugh and the police would not give the case priority as the victim was to stupid.
It’s nothing new here, far more scammers 100 years ago and before but probably more attention now as the media love this stories.
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March 19th, 2010 at 5:48 am
Dave G said:
I wouldn’t bet on that, psychics rely on human tendancies that have very little to do with education. former French president Mitterand was known to have a very solid classical education and to be a political mastermind, yet he was also regulary consulting a medium (and using its security service to spy on some actresses but that’s another story)
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March 19th, 2010 at 7:19 am
Some years ago there was a news article: In Philadephia, where the local council has decided upon a crackdown on psychics, fortune tellers & tarot readers etc. I believe the headline was ‘Philadephia Psychics didn’t see raids coming’, but I could only find this story:
http://www.livescience.com/strangenews/070516_philadelphia_psychics.html
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March 19th, 2010 at 10:15 am
[Other] Matthew said:
Magic and religion have gone hand-in-hand for centuries. It is impossible to create a distinct line between magic and religion, because they both have relatively the same concept: they both depend on the belief in supernatural powers.
In fact most folklorist magic-making is the remnant of some religion or other, and the entities we call mythic figures were the worshiped gods and goddesses in the past. What is considered superstitious practices today were the religious rites of yore.
You cannot logically assign credibility to one and not the other based on how it is currently named.
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March 19th, 2010 at 11:41 am
magne said:
Uh… isn’t that called counterfeiting? I mean, copying money to regular paper is easy but it has the big flaw that regular paper does not feel like or look quite like monetary paper. If he had a way to overcome this, I think the term would be “high quality counterfeiting” or something.
There are various ways used to create counterfeit currency that is at least somewhat more convincing than a simple copy onto regular paper, but it’s still not real money and highly illegal.
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March 19th, 2010 at 12:35 pm
In other psychic related news:
It appears that Heidi Montag has fired her manager, whom also was her psychic. Strangly enough, that manager didn’t see his termination coming in his crystal ball… Imagine if you will…
http://www.aceshowbiz.com/news/view/00031398.html
(Being Dutch, I first saw the news at http://www.nu.nl/achterklap/2208561/heidi-montag-ontslaat-helderziende.html , but I’m pretty sure that a small minority of this blog’s readers won’t be able to read it…)
Firing her psychic manager seems like a smart move, but If you read closer, it’s not for the reasons you would expect. It appears he was fired for misbehaving, not mismanaging. I just hope Heidi will also become a bit more skeptical.
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March 19th, 2010 at 2:26 pm
[Other] Matthew said:
I come from a family that has been fairly religious as mainstream Catholics. Normally baptism is not done right at the time of birth but a bit later. When my sister was born she was slightly premature and had some trouble breathing the first few days, but she got better. My parents were concerned that she might die shortly after birth.
As soon as she was born the number one concern was to urgently get a priest to come in and sprinkle water on her and say some holy phrases. If this happened and she died then she would go to heaven and all would be fine for her soul. If she died before the priest could get there, my mother was absolutely convinced that god, in all his loving wisdom, would not allow her into heaven and she would go into “limbo” or the first level of hell, which is not torturous with fire, but which is an existence of nothingness in between damnation and salvation. It is known as “Limbo of Infants” and it is a central belief in Christianity.
Please explain to me the logic here? Lets say the baby was born somewhere remote and it cost thousands of dollars to get a priest there by helicopter or something. Would that be logical? According to the beliefs of my family, it would be absolutely justified because without the baptism, the soul will be left suspended for eternity.
I used to have a friend who was a religious Jew and followed Kosher law. Out of curiosity I once asked him what would happen if he realized he had inadvertently eaten some pork or had dairy at the same sitting as meat. He explained to me that he would then be impure and would be unfit for attending any Jewish ceremony or having marital relations and that this needed to be remedied as soon as possible by going through a ritual of prayer, fasting and a ceremony involving a ritual bath prepared by a rabbi. After the bath he’d be good as new.
I’m again at a loss. How is this logical?
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March 19th, 2010 at 4:36 pm
Okay, I’ll bite.
Everyone is responsible for their own actions and no means NO.
What we see with a lot of the woo-woo (psychics, dowsers, homeopaths etc, etc.) is that for a LOT of people being thoughtful and analytic is not high up their priorities. Rationality is just a thin layer over a mass of emotions which developed over a couple of million years for the purpose of belonging to the pack, finding shelter, food, and a mate. Belonging to the pack and losing virginity are extreme priorities for the adolescent human male (I was one once).
Now a female goes out giving out every possible non-verbal signal of fertility and availability. She deliberately goes to a place where verbal communication is limited by high ambient noise and alcohol blurs the situation even further.
Is an unwanted encounter more or less likely in this scenario?
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March 19th, 2010 at 4:52 pm
FatBigot said:
I think what I would say to that is that a female who is dressed provocatively and may act provocatively and does so in an area where there’s a high probability of encounters might be, at least in part, the one to be blamed for getting a lot of leers, cat calls, being oogled and having a line of horny young guys constantly and possibly rudely asking her if she wants to dance or have a drink.
In other words: getting a lot of attention. If she does not want that kind of attention she shouldn’t be so attractive to it.
But that is different than having someone force sex on her. No matter how short the skirt is, it’s not at all expected or in any way reduced in severity if some guy takes her out in the ally, holds their hand over her mouth as she tries to yell for help and has their way with her against the dumpster.
Rude flirting is not the same as rape.
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March 20th, 2010 at 1:20 am
Gordon said:
I would agree that that’s all fairly silly, but I would point out that it’s not an inherently areligious position. There are any number of theologians that would wholeheartedly agree with us. In fact there are several Christian sects that explicitly reject infant baptism for essentially that reason.
They take the position that the baptism ritual is merely a symbolic representation of a spiritual cleansing that can’t happen without the knowing and willing participation of the person being baptized. In short, you CANNOT baptize someone without their informed consent, and since infants are clearly incapable of granting informed consent they can’t be baptized in any meaningful way.
Gordon said:
Well, as I implied above participation in ritual activities by presumably intelligent, informed adults is a different situation. It’s probably easiest to get my point across with an example. Since it’s March, I’ll go with something from basketball–free throws–and since I’m a Kansas State fan I’ll go with the player Jacob Pullen.
Every time he shoots a free throw he goes through a very specific ritual. He gets the ball from the referee, passes it from his right hand to his left hand behind his back, dribbles it twice, spins it in his left hand, catches it and lines his right hand up on the ball and finally shoots the free throw. I would guess that if he shot 100 free throws with the ritual and 100 without it, he’d hit more when he does the ritual. That’s not to say that the ritual has any supernatural impact on his ability to shoot free throws, but it provides a convenient way for him to get into the right frame of mind for shooting free throws.
Similarly, using a particular ritual as a way to facilitate a particular spiritual experience seems entirely justifiable. Obviously, there’s a risk that the person involved will fail to grasp the distinction between the ritual and true spiritual event that it’s designed to facilitate, but whether that occurs is not something that anyone besides the participant and God is qualified to address.
There’s a more in depth essay on the topic available at http://www.uwgb.edu/DutchS/PSEUDOSC/21CMagic.HTM . If you follow the link to the Pseudosience Index at the bottom of the page there’s more interesting reading as well. The Science and Religion section is particularly relevant to the current discussion.
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March 20th, 2010 at 1:45 am
Gordon said:
And what if he doesn’t realise at all? Does that exempt him from the whole ritual? Another question is, who came up with these rules anyway? Why am I (as being raised Catholic) allowed to eat pork meat when it’s explicitly forbidden in the bible, except that I’m not allowed any meat on Friday, but I can have fish?
(voice=”Robbie the Robot”) Gee, I’m having some difficulty making that compute well… (/voice)
Gordon said:
…me too…
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March 20th, 2010 at 2:02 am
LcNessie said:
I believe that there is a fairly good consensus that most of the rules of kosher law come down to some kind of need or observation of health effects or something. Shellfish is forbidden and this almost certainly came from the observation that they can kill you if there’s been a red tide in the area. Pork may be forbidden because it was more likely to carry parasites but it’s also been proposed that because pigs eat the same good as humans, but eating pork is a less effecient way of getting the calories, it was noted that raising pigs could make famine worse.
Many Jews today, such as most reform Jews don’t bother with kosher law and recognize it as being an obsolete health code. However, many Orthodox Jews don’t believe it’s like that – they consider these things to be spiritually impure and decreed by god as unfit for human consumption. So even if they were sterilized and perfectly safe, they would not eat them because god commanded not to.
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March 20th, 2010 at 3:18 am
drbuzz0 said:
Yes, I tend to agree on that one.
It’s just that most Christians, I believe even the most conservative ones, just plain ignore Leviticus 11:7 “And the pig, though it has a split hoof completely divided, does not chew the cud; it is unclean for you.” (As do I, for that matter… Lay on the bacon, BAYby!)
And is there a clear health-reason for Canon 1251, “Abstinence from meat, or from some other food as determined by the Episcopal Conference, is to be observed on all Fridays, unless a solemnity should fall on a Friday. (…)” and why is fish Ok to eat instead? I believe this is a Catholics-only thing… It says something about “In reparation for the grave sin of abortion”…
Don’t worry too much, I don’t know these verse numbers by heart. I had to look them up on ye olde Google as well…
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March 20th, 2010 at 7:21 am
LcNessie said:
There are probably more ‘origins’ to this than any other Christian superstition, including a holdover from Roman honoring the goddess Venus as Friday was named for Venus in many of the languages based on Latin, to an subsidy to the fishing industry, to a fasting custom of Greek Jews, that was not common in other Jewish communities at the time of Christ. I’ve never gotten a straight answer.
Of all the religious practices we grew up with, the last of them that my wife and I dropped was this one. We both love seafood and I guess we were conditioned to both crave and expect it on Fridays. Still to this day if we order fish in a restaurant, or make it at home, it will likely be on a Friday. Funny
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March 20th, 2010 at 11:26 am
Doc:
I’ve no idea whether this will make it past the new and improved spam filters, but I thought you might appreciate a heads up on this story if you hadn’t seen it already.
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March 20th, 2010 at 3:02 pm
apotheosis said:
Yes I’ve seen that and I think brought it up before. there was a time when radium quack cures were popular.
While I do see a lot of evidence for homeostasis in radiation exposure, that does not mean I see any value in these kind of tonics and drinks. The radiation exposure is not properly measured and metered per dose and it is not clear that radiation exposure via this kind of mechanism is at all good for you. Radium, for example, is a high energy alpha emitter, so instead of getting uniform exposure to all cells, it would probably over-expose cells it came into direct contact with and the rest would get negligible exposure. A VERY BAD way of getting radiation exposure.
There’s no dosimeter and it’s entirely in the hands of an amateur. It’s surely possible that one could over-expose themselves and even if they didn’t, the benefits are dubious at best.
Furthermore, these products were not consistent or regulated for content. They often contained large amounts of toxic heavy metals. They might contain uranium, lead other materials. While I’m sure the toxicity of uranium is very low, it’s still not something you want to ingest in quantity every day for months or years on end.
Eben Byers death is a good example of what can happen when. He drank a lot of a radium drink. Radium levels would have been low, if only because radium was very expensive, but he drank enough to get some pretty heavy exposure. It appears what happened is that it caused very strong local exposure in his jaw. The radium was most concentrated there, and being primarily a particle emitter, most of the radiation was local. It may have managed to get into his teeth and jaw bone, as it is chemically similar to calcium. Eventually it caused enough exposure to start killing tissue.
Radium tends to be an especially nasty radiotoxic substance. Note that it states
“Distributed through his bones, calculated Dr. Frederick Bonner Flinn of Columbia University, were 36 micrograms of radium. Ten micrograms is a fatal quantity.”
Radium tends to be absorbed into bone tissue. It’s not mobile there – it tends to be retained and it causes a lot of local tissue damage and breakdown of the bone and bone marrow.
I don’t quite remember, but I think I blogged on this before.
Oh by the way: radium-226, which is truly one of the nastiest radioisotopes for biological uptake, accumulation, tissue damage, difficulty in disposal etc etc is not made in nuclear reactors at all. It’s 100% natural!
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March 22nd, 2010 at 5:59 am
LcNessie said:
Is this where the “I’m vegetarian … but I eat fish” thing comes from?
Gordon said:
I can’t explain logic where there isn’t any. To suggest a child is born anything other than wholly innocent is clearly nonsense and an insult to God and the child to boot. In fact the religion I subscribe to explicitly says that children who die before they are old enough to be accountable for their actions effectively have a Get Into Heaven Free card (this also includes adults with various forms of mental illnesses but I don’t recall the reference).
DV82XL said:
I can, and do, make a distinction between magic and the supernatural, and religion and the regular natural, but it’s perfectly true to suggest that over time they have influenced each other to varying degrees.
However the comments section of a web page is not the easiest of mediums in which to discuss this (or anything much). If you are really interested in understanding how (and why) I make the distinction, and how I can both believe in God and still be sceptical, then feel free to contact me directly (somewhere I’m not stuck in a web browser
).
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March 22nd, 2010 at 6:13 am
[Other] Matthew said:
Eh? What about original sin? Infant damnation was a regular feature of the Roman Church until sometime in the middle ages when Limbo was invented as a concession to popular taste. Some protestant sects promptly reinstated it once they formed. And I’ve never heard of mental illness being a disqualifier for damnation. Indeed, mental illness was for the most part held to be evidence of diabolical possession.
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March 22nd, 2010 at 6:36 am
Finrod said:
What about it? It’s rubbish made up to instil fear.
“Behold I say unto you that this thing shall ye teach—repentance and baptism unto those who are accountable and capable of committing sin;” (emphasis added)
ie. Not everyone is capable of committing sin. Especially babies, who are not yet able to act for themselves.
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March 22nd, 2010 at 6:52 am
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March 22nd, 2010 at 7:11 am
Sorry I should have included that – http://scriptures.lds.org/moro/8/10#10
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March 22nd, 2010 at 7:20 am
[Other] Matthew said:
That’s from the Book of Mormon. If you deny inherited Original Sin and the need for redemption, aren’t you denying the validity of the Apostle’s Creed?
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March 22nd, 2010 at 7:48 am
Finrod said:
Yes, on both counts. While not entirely wrong, the creed is not entirely right either.
I’d elaborate but I don’t like poisoning buzz0’s otherwise excellent web site with an irrelevant discussions on religion. I couldn’t find a contact page on your website and I don’t have one, so I’ll just have the computer take on the task of ignoring a bit more spam – my email address is matthew.king *ÅŤ* monnsta.net.
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March 22nd, 2010 at 8:17 am
[Other] Matthew said:
Bluntly, I am even more disinterested in the Mormon’s homemade scripture, than I am the moldering Bronze-age screeds of mainstream Judo-Christianity. Both are no more that fiction, and rather poor fiction at that, in most cases.
Both claim divine authorship, and ‘prove’ it by circular logic based entirely on their own claims of inerrancy, which is ridiculous on its face. Both demand subordinating reason to dogma, which has been proven time and time again to be outright dangerous.
There is no grounds for debate here, unless you can extend proof positive of both the existence of a deity, and that this entity transmitted his will through these texts.
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March 22nd, 2010 at 9:03 am
DV82XL said:
Frankly I didn’t expect you to, I wished simply to move the discussion somewhere it wouldn’t be totally out of place, however if you don’t wish to hear anything which may risk upsetting your beliefs, I would not speak authoritatively on the subject just as I do not claim to speak authoritatively on the subjects of nuclear fission, vaccination, or many of the other topics which come up and in which I can barely call myself amateur.
DV82XL said:
I cannot, and the church cannot prove anything, nor do they or I claim to. That you suppose they do is a sad example of your willingness to hold an unchanging opinion in spite of evidence that the facts on which it is based are incorrect.
To get slightly back on topic, religions and psychics can, and often do, appear closely related. This is a sad state of affairs, but I assert that this is not always the case, rather that when it is, religion has been twisted into a mockery of itself. It is done for the same reasons that psychics ply their trade – to prey on the weak and impressionable for the fraud’s own selfish gratification and profit.
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March 22nd, 2010 at 9:31 am
[Other] Matthew said:
Sorry, you don’t get a free pass on something like that.
I do not suppose that any religion proves anything, and it borders on dissemination for you to suggest that I think so based on what I have written previously. I daresay too that my own formal grounding in Christian theology is somewhat more in depth than your own, as I spent years under the tutelage of French Jesuits, at a time when scripture and religious studies were part of the curriculum. They also however honed my mind into a critical instrument, and the religion fell apart under close examination. My atheism has nothing to do with belief or faith beyond rejecting that which cannot be proven true.
As for you upsetting my view of reality with your silly ideas, the conceit of that remark is just breathtaking as is your assertion that you can tell the difference between religious practices and any other supernatural nonsense.
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March 23rd, 2010 at 2:31 am
[Other] Matthew said:
Yet with this lack of proof, many people are asked, or even forced to accept the local religion as the absolute truth.
I revised my personal religion from “Catholic” via “LcNessie’s OSR V0.1″ to “my own agnostic leaning towards Atheism”, because of the lack of evidence and weird inconsistencies and plain errors in a single script that is presented as THE absolute truth. If this absolute truth already falls apart in the first two chapters, (If I’m not mistaken: Genesis 1, basically all was created in one *POOF!* and Genesis 2, “On the 5th day of christmass my darling gave to me… Whooooops, wroooohooong sooooong!…) it’s a bit hard for me to accept it as THE absolute truth.
I however, do not subscribe *completely* to the “We have no evidence that it exists, so it doesn’t exist” part, that’s why I keep the options open. However, I do use the “No evidence it does exist, assume it does not exist until proven otherwise”. And with proof, I mean the proof that Carl Sagan suggests. The extraordinary undeniable kind. Not some book that has been proven wrong, proven edited, proven moderated, proven incomplete (and overcomplete at the same time), and so forth and so on. There is in my opinion still room for %varDeity, since we have no idea how to define the divine. With the advances in knowledge, the space for %varDeity becomes smaller and smaller. (Think “Planck Constant” or “the geezer in a smoky bar who struck the cue-ball a bit awkwardly and set off the Big Bang, and is now watching the results of his scratch unfold. Ether that, or he killed himself in the process.”)
The room for fortune-telling (for example astrology and tartots) became non-existent some time ago, as it has been proven statistically indistinguishable from chance. That, and the recent development of the uncertainty principle and chaos theory. And the fact that the guy didn’t see his own incarceration coming in his own stars, tarot cards, tea leaves, hand-palms or any other means of telling the fortune.
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March 24th, 2010 at 9:35 am
Reading this story makes me wonder. Why was this woman still on the streets? Wasn’t she on probation for a fortune telling scam already? Why does the family have to hire a Private Investigator like Bob Nygaard? Is he the only one who can break the spell?
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