Psychic scams How to spot psychic scams
Psychic scams: what to look for
Identical psychic scam letters are sent to thousands of homes
The initial contact from psychic scammers – whether by letter, phone or email – is unsolicited.
Psychic scam letters are addressed to you personally and will often use your name throughout. Scammers may also reference your locality to make the psychic scam letter feel like it has only been sent to you.
Far from being a personalised letter from a psychic, the same scam is sent out to hundreds of thousands people, each personalised automatically using computer software.
Psychic or clairvoyant scammers may try to sound genuine by telling you something about yourself. Even if this information seems correct, question whether the information is general enough to be something that could actually be true about many people.
Bogus psychic powers
You may also be asked vague questions and receive wide-ranging statements about your future, predicting good fortune, a bad event or a mixture of both.
Psychic scammers will usually ask you to respond with some urgency in a matter or days or weeks.
All mailings claim to offer some degree of mystical influence or psychic insight in exchange for money – see 'How psychic scams work' for some examples. If the clairvoyant or psychic asks you for money upfront, it is a scam and should be ignored.
The psychic scam may not explicitly ask for cash – it could be phrased as a goodwill donation or even ask you to buy a small charm or talisman.
Psychic scammers uncovered
In 2006, Which? reported on a Swiss company investigated by the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) for distributing psychic scam letters to people in the UK. The letters predicted bad luck, danger and severe abuse for those who failed to respond.
Identical psychic letters were sent to a large number of consumers, but each was personalised to the recipient to make it seem more convincing.
The letter claimed a medium had foreseen a threat to the consumer and offered them protection if they ordered an item costing £17. It also promised those who ordered the product would be shown how to win large sums of money.
After receiving more than 30 complaints from UK consumers, the OFT's Scambusters team wrote to ETLA S.A., the Swiss company behind the letters, expressing its concerns over the threatening and potentially misleading content of the letters.
ETLA responded by assuring the OFT it had ceased distributing the mailing to UK consumers and would not do so again.