This excellent Canadian documentary on the Maria Duval “psychic” fraud starts with a much broader context and an important statistic I didn’t know.
Mail-order business started in the 1880s with Sears and Wards. We naturally assume it peaked before the suburban era when everyone had cars. Other parallel practices like grocery and laundry delivery peaked before the car era, and are starting to regrow again thanks to a newer and better generation that doesn’t like cars.
Not true for mail order! It rose steadily and peaked in the 1990s, JUST before Bezos grabbed the peak and shifted it to the web his grandpa founded. Presumably this is WHY Bezos grabbed it and killed the competition. Lots of products were moving into mail order around 1990, including frauds and psychics. This fits my experience; I started buying clothing from LLBean, furniture from JCPenney, and books from Dover in the late 80s. The interviewer is a Millenial who was a kid in the 90s. He remembered that psychics as well as mail order were a huge thing. He also mentioned seeing ads in comic books for “X-ray glasses”. Now there’s one durable fraud! I saw those same ads in comic books in the 50s!
Rachel Brown, the reporter in this podcast, spent some time talking with chief fraudster Patrice Runner in jail. Runner started his career with a variety of mailorder businesses, some legit and some shady. He noticed the popularity of Maria Duval and got in touch with her. She was already running a franchise business, licensing her name to letter-writing scams in Europe. (Other podcasts made her sound like a vulnerable elder. She wasn’t.) Runner offered to open a North American branch of her business. He paid for the rights to use her identity and launched his mailorder factory. He continued using mail because his favorite suckers were old folks who relied on the mail for companionship and entertainment, and didn’t use the web.
The postal employee section at reddit has a discussion of the ONE HOUSE on each route that receives and sends massive amounts of letters. Most of them are older ladies who open and answer every single request for charity or contributions. It keeps them busy and feels like companionship. Of course the more you answer the more you get, since scammers love to share lists.
Another evocative question from the interviewer. Aren’t all psychics basically frauds? What makes this one special? Reporter Brown had asked the US authorities about it. Two factors made this one different. First, there was no actual psychic, whether you believe in their talents or not. Suckers were led to believe that a psychic was personally “reading” them and giving advice based on the “reading”, but the whole operation was mechanized. Second, the predatory nature. Instead of a fixed price per “reading”, the factory kept pumping out more and demanding more money.
My answer would be different. PAY FOR VALUE includes more than just physical value like food and clothing and tools. Anything that improves your life or makes you feel better is also value. Entertainment, gym workouts, therapy, church. If the suckers feel better after receiving a horoscope, no crime. Brazenly taking advantage of nice gullible old ladies is a crime. You don’t feel better when all your money is gone.
Some psychics provide real therapy. They observe the customer and read his personality and gestures, and give useful advice instead of meaningless predictions. Doesn’t matter if real therapy is branded by Spirits or Freud or Hippocrates or Jesus, it’s still therapy.
Polistra's Mill 