Human history is full of examples of people claiming to have a link to the divine, to the world of the dead, to spirits and more. Alexander the Great visited the Oracle at Amun in 332 BC. Astrology was developed in the 3rd millennium BC in Mesopotamia. Fortune-telling goes back as far as 4000 BCE as well. And much of this is done in a way that’s arguably harmless. But not all of it, especially not in the modern world. People who claim to be psychic and have a link directly to God or the dead have had a devastating impact on the lives of many people. And sometimes they trip up and fall flat on their faces doing it.
10. Sylvia Browne Bungles a Kidnapping
Sylvia Browne made a name for herself as a psychic on the daytime talk show circuit and published a number of books before she died in 2013. In what turned out to be one of her most infamously wrong psychic predictions, Brown told Louwanna Miller that her daughter Amanda was dead. This happened in 2004 on The Montel Williams Show.
Louwanna died in 2006, believing her daughter was dead. In 2013, Amanda Berry was rescued from the home of Ariel Castro along with two other women where she’d been held captive for a decade. After she escaped, she revealed that Castro had left a TV on for the women to watch during the day. In 2004, she had seen the episode of Montel Williams that her mother was on and she had to watch as a woman claiming to be a psychic, a woman she thought would finally be able to tell her mother the truth and set her free, said the exact opposite.
Montel Williams later apologized to Berry, but Browne maintained that she was always right more than she was wrong, and it was good to be wrong about something like that.
9. Noreen Renier Fails Kimberly McAndrew
Noreen Renier has been in the psychic game for years and claims to have helped police solve over 600 crimes. One of these crimes was the disappearance of Kimberly Andrews, a 19-year-old Canadian who vanished in 1989 on her way home from work. In 1995, with no progress, Noreen Renier came in to help find her.
Noreen sat down with both police and family to help locate Kimberly. Transcripts of her interviews include her saying things like “Your sister just finally gave up on you. You’re the procrastinator in the family” to Kimberly’s sister when she admitted to not writing down her dreams. She offered details of Kimberly’s last day and supposed demise, many of which didn’t align with facts already in evidence. Even simple things like what door she left to go home from work,
After sending police to two locations which they searched with divers that came up empty, police told her of a suspect named Jamie who confessed. Only then did Noreen decide she had conjured up a name, someone called Jimmy. When she’s told that the suspect is named James, and she was already told that, she just says “oh, darn.” They then performed a third search, wasting yet more resources. No one has ever been arrested in the case.
8. Uri Geller Exposed
One of the most famous cases of a psychic getting owned on national TV came to us thanks to the late, great Johnny Carson. Famous for bending spoons and other tricks, Uri Geller was going to show off his talents for the audience. Carson insisted on setting up the props instead of letting Geller do it. The result was Geller failing at everything, stalling, making excuses, and clearly being uncomfortable.
Magicians came out and labeled him an outright fraud. Geller blamed his failure on a hostile environment and not the fact he wasn’t able to set up the props ahead of time. Famed skeptic James Randi exposed Geller’s tricks and explained how anyone could bend spoons. Geller later sued a publisher for defamation, a case which he lost. The court ordered him to pay $20,000 in legal fees as well.
7. Psychic Zoe the Thief
Ann Thompson was making a living as a fortune teller named Psychic Zoe. Her speciality seemed to be defrauding the gullible which she did to the tune of $800,000. As a result of her scheming, she ended up being charged with fraud.
Thompson’s massive scam actually only took in two victims. One was a businessman who got scammed out of $72,000. The second victim was a Canadian woman who got bilked for a stunning $740,000.
Obviously, the victims in this case share some of the blame for going along with what most people would recognize as a total scam. For instance, one of the things Thompson asked the Canadian woman to do was buy her a 9.2 carat diamond ring. Why did she need to buy such a thing for a psychic? Because if she didn’t, she’d never find love again.
When she finally went on trial for fraud and grand larceny, Thompson and an accomplice only got five years’ probation and were ordered to pay back some of the over $1 million they were ultimately found guilty of stealing.
6. Long Island Medium Miss After Miss Live
One of the most popular psychics today is the Long Island Medium, Theresa Caputo. Though she’s very famous and her show is edited to make her look remarkable and genuine, her live shows are not always so smooth.
A writer from New Jersey went to a live show at which Caputo attempted to cold read the audience and failed again and again. She’d nail simple things like “who had a father who passed,” which could arguably be dozens of people in the room, and then fumble the next question, trying to guess the reason why or other personal details.
People have said that producers from Caputo’s show interviewed them before they talked to the psychic, getting all the details ahead of time, which takes some of the wonder out of a psychic reading.
5. Sylvia Browne on the Sago Mine
Sylvia Browne just couldn’t help being wrong, so she’s making a second appearance on the list. This time she again follows the already-familiar pattern of saying people are dead when they aren’t and doing it in front of TV cameras. The fact was, she had a long, noted history of being wrong about many things, but some stung more than others.
In 2006, 13 coal miners were trapped when the mine in Sago, West Virginia, collapsed. Sylvia happened to be live on the radio when it happened, and the host alerted her to the event as it broke. He told her, based on the reports that were available at the time, that the miners were all alive. Sylvia explained that she knew they would be found.
In reality, all but one of the miners died. The host got the updated info and told Sylvia, who immediately agreed that none were alive, as though the story were unclear and she was using her powers to divine it.
4. John Edward Accused of Hot Reading
Psychics work in several ways, but the most famous methods are cold reading and hot reading. You may have seen cold reading in action, it’s when the alleged psychic asks incredibly vague questions and lets people fill in the blanks. They’ll say things like “I’m getting an R, does anyone have an R name” in front of a crowd of people. The odds are that someone will have a dead relative with the initial R, or S or T, or however many letters they need to go through.
Hot reading is less common and harder to do because it requires research. Hot reading can involve spying on people with hidden microphones or doing online research about a subject, then pretending the information was gleaned by the spirits
John Edward, who had a daytime TV show for some years in which he did psychic readings, was caught doing hot reading. The idea was that assistants on the show were having potential guests fill out comment cards that included personal details and family trees before the show. One guest also noted that, when the show aired, it had been edited to make it look like he was nodding in agreement with things Edward was saying, even though they weren’t true.
The guest also noted that between the time the audience was seated and the start of the show, there was an hour delay. During that time, much of the crowd discussed the reasons they had arrived, in particular the dead loved ones they wanted to contact, all while aides from the show were chatting them up.
3. Laurie McQuary and The Undead Reporter
Laurie McQuary claimed that she had been a psychic detective for 30 years and had solved hundreds of missing persons cases. In an effort to test her accuracy and ability to deliver on that promise, a producer from the show Inside Edition pretended to be the brother of a missing child. He brought a photo of the missing girl and set up an interview. The cost was $400.
McQuary proceeded to explain how the girl was sexually assaulted and then had her head beaten in with a rock. She said she could locate the body as well.
The next day she had another meeting, this time with a woman named Lisa Guerrero, who also worked for Inside Edition as an on-air correspondent. Guerrero had some concerns with McQuary’s previous reading owing to the fact that the photo of the supposedly dead girl was a childhood photo of Guerrero.
McQuary left the interview, but 10 other psychics also confirmed that the girl in the photo was dead.
2. Debra Dominique Outed at a Denny’s
Debra Dominique claims to be a professional psychic and pet psychic on LinkedIn. She has not had the international fame that some of the psychics we’ve covered have enjoyed, but she has outed herself in much the same way many of them have as being not entirely trustworthy.
Most psychics are arguably doing harmless things by telling people they may get their dream job soon or that their love life will get better. But Dominique waded into the waters of being a psychic detective, claiming she helped find the body of Laci Peterson. The CBS affiliate in Sacramento figured someone that was trusted by the FBI should be able to answer a few questions about a missing person, so they took her to a Denny’s and filmed her in secret to see what would happen.
Dominique looked at photos of a missing boy and determined that he was dead, the victim of child trafficking. She even stated that his body was buried in Europe and she was channeling his spirit for a moment. The entire time, the actual boy from the photo was sitting in the booth behind her.
For what it’s worth, the station also interviewed an FBI agent who went on record saying the FBI has never solved a case with the help of a psychic.
1. Maria Duval’s Massive Scam
Maria Duval didn’t have the name recognition of Sylvia Browne or John Edward but she could scam as well as any fraud psychic and managed to rake in a ton of cash doing so. According to the Justice Department, she defrauded her victims for about $180 million.
Duval, whose real name was Maria Carolina Gamba, ran a mail fraud racket claiming to be a psychic. She gained notoriety after alleging to have used her psychic powers to find Bridget Bardot’s missing dog, which was not true. Bardot herself pointed out that her dog wasn’t missing, it died, and no psychic found it.
The scam involves sending personalized letters, usually to the sick and elderly. There were whole companies of people involved in churning these out en masse, designing them to look personalized and handwritten. It’s even been said that some had coffee stains on them to give them authenticity.
The personal details were taken from data miners, but they made the letters seem like the person writing truly knew who they were writing them to. They clearly worked, given how many victims fell for it and how much money they made. Each round of correspondence cost a person $40. Plus there were extras like lucky talismans that would cost more.
Though the Justice Department shut the scam down, that was only in the United States. The company behind the letters is still going strong in other parts of the world.