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The scam quickly changed form, as sick and elderly people started receiving letters promising the psychic help of "Maria Duval" for $40 per mail consultation. The scam would quickly take gigantic proportions and generate some $200 million in revenues for the fraudsters running it. It appears only a very small portion of that money made its way ...
The Maria Duval scam is one of the most successful mail scams in history, having defrauded millions of people out of at least $200 million over twenty years. Targeting sick and elderly people through a combination of personalized letters and personal information databases, it has been shut down in the United States in 2016, but is still ongoing in many countries.
A review published in several newspapers praised Randi's "ability to deflate the practitioners of the occult in understated prose". [7] [8] [9] In The Manhattan Mercury, R. M. Seaton noted that Randi "exposes the frauds that have been believed by gullible people from ancient times right up to the present". [10]
Fortune telling fraud, also called the bujo or egg curse scam, is a type of confidence trick, based on a claim of secret or occult information. The basic feature of the scam involves diagnosing the victim (the "mark") with some sort of secret problem that only the grifter can detect or diagnose, and then charging the mark for ineffectual ...
The Stargate Project was a secret U.S. Army unit established in 1977 [1] [2] at Fort Meade, Maryland, by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and SRI International (a California contractor) to investigate the potential for psychic phenomena in military and domestic intelligence applications.
Bob Nygaard is an American private investigator (PI) specializing in the investigation of confidence crimes, most notably psychic fraud.He has been instrumental in the arrest and conviction of numerous psychics, helping their victims obtain justice including financial restitution amounting to millions of dollars.
Project Alpha was an effort by magician James Randi to test the quality of scientific rigor of a well-known test of paranormal phenomena.. In the late 1970s, Randi contacted the newly established McDonnell Laboratory for Psychical Research ("MacLab") with suggestions on how to conduct tests for paranormal phenomena.
Sean David Morton is a self-described psychic, ufologist and alleged remote viewer who has referred to himself as "America's Prophet." Until legal troubles led to his incarceration in a federal prison, he also hosted radio shows, authored books, and made documentary films about the paranormal. [1]