Fortune telling fraud
Encyclopedia
Fortune telling fraud, also called the bujo or egg curse scam, is a type of confidence trick
Confidence trick
A confidence trick is an attempt to defraud a person or group by gaining their confidence. A confidence artist is an individual working alone or in concert with others who exploits characteristics of the human psyche such as dishonesty and honesty, vanity, compassion, credulity, irresponsibility,...

, 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
Grifter
Grifter is a fictional comic book character from in the Wildstorm Universe. He is best known as a member of Jim Lee's WildC.A.T.S...

 can detect or diagnose, and then charging the mark for ineffectual treatments. The archetypical grifter working the scam is a fortune teller who announces that the mark is suffering from a curse that her magic
Magic (paranormal)
Magic is the claimed art of manipulating aspects of reality either by supernatural means or through knowledge of occult laws unknown to science. It is in contrast to science, in that science does not accept anything not subject to either direct or indirect observation, and subject to logical...

 can relieve, while threatening dire consequences if the curse is not lifted.

Fortune telling scams

In this scam, a fortune teller uses her cold reading
Cold reading
Cold reading is a series of techniques used by mentalists, psychics, fortune-tellers, illusionists, and con artists to determine or express details about another person, often in order to convince them that the reader knows much more about a subject than they actually do...

 skill to detect that a client is genuinely troubled rather than merely seeking entertainment; or is a gambler complaining of bad luck
Luck
Luck or fortuity is good fortune which occurs beyond one's control, without regard to one's will, intention, or desired result. There are at least two senses people usually mean when they use the term, the prescriptive sense and the descriptive sense...

. The fortune teller informs the mark that they are the victim of a curse
Curse
A curse is any expressed wish that some form of adversity or misfortune will befall or attach to some other entity—one or more persons, a place, or an object...

, but that for a fee a spell can be cast to remove the curse. In Romany
Romani language
Romani or Romany, Gypsy or Gipsy is any of several languages of the Romani people. They are Indic, sometimes classified in the "Central" or "Northwestern" zone, and sometimes treated as a branch of their own....

, this trick is called bujo, originally meaning simply "bag", but now meaning "a swindle involving a large amount of money from a gullible fortune-telling customer."

This name comes from a traditional form: the mark is told that the curse is in their money; they bring money in a bag to have the spell cast over it, and leave with a bag of worthless paper; or money or property are given to the fortune teller to be destroyed as bearing the curse, and an item of lesser value is swapped and conspicuously destroyed instead. In some cases the curse is "verified" by a sleight of hand trick, often involving an egg, The grifter tells the mark to bring an egg to a reading, which when cracked open reveals disgusting matter or symbols of evil. This discovery confirms the curse.

These scams continue into the present day. A 1996 reported decision out of Hawaii described the scam as "a centuries old confidence game that victimized the elderly or those with emotional problems", describing its operation in this manner:
A Texas woman was sentenced to 2 years on Federal charges for wire fraud
Wire fraud
Mail and wire fraud is a federal crime in the United States. Together, 18 U.S.C. §§ 1341, 1343, and 1346 reach any fraudulent scheme or artifice to intentionally deprive another of property or honest services with a nexus to mail or wire communication....

 and money laundering
Money laundering
Money laundering is the process of disguising illegal sources of money so that it looks like it came from legal sources. The methods by which money may be laundered are varied and can range in sophistication. Many regulatory and governmental authorities quote estimates each year for the amount...

 after she operated a scam involving a psychic telephone line. Not only did she receive fees of several hundred dollars for her psychic counselling, but she also convinced her clients to send her money and property to be cleansed of "evil". In 2002, two self-described California psychic
Psychic
A psychic is a person who professes an ability to perceive information hidden from the normal senses through extrasensory perception , or is said by others to have such abilities. It is also used to describe theatrical performers who use techniques such as prestidigitation, cold reading, and hot...

s were indicted on Federal mail fraud charges after persuading people to pay them to be cleared of bad karma
Karma
Karma in Indian religions is the concept of "action" or "deed", understood as that which causes the entire cycle of cause and effect originating in ancient India and treated in Hindu, Jain, Buddhist and Sikh philosophies....

. In 2006, two Connecticut women told another woman that God was going to kill her unless she paid them to perform various rituals, including chicken sacrifice
Sacrifice
Sacrifice is the offering of food, objects or the lives of animals or people to God or the gods as an act of propitiation or worship.While sacrifice often implies ritual killing, the term offering can be used for bloodless sacrifices of cereal food or artifacts...

s, on her behalf. In Palmdale, California, a psychic reader was accused of inducing a 12 year old girl to steal $10,000 worth of jewelry from her parents by threats of a curse.

A desire to protect people from this scam has been one argument made to justify legislation that makes fortune telling a crime. A New York State statute condemns a person who "claims or pretends" to "influence or affect evil spirits or curses" in its prohibition of fortune telling, while letting a person "who engages in the aforedescribed conduct as part of a show or exhibition solely for the purpose of entertainment or amusement" off the hook. Most current judicial opinions have held that fortune telling in itself is protected speech under the First Amendment, though some judges have noted that "such devices are routinely, if not uniformly used to bilk or fleece gullible patrons."

High tech variants

In the Datalink Computer Services incident
Datalink Computer Services incident
The Datalink Computer Products incident refers to an alleged scam by Vickram Bedi and Helga Ingvarsdóttir to defraud Roger C. Davidson through their business, Datalink Computer Products in Mount Kisco, New York...

, a mark was fleeced of several million dollars by a firm that claimed that his computer was infected with viruses, and that the infection indicated an elaborate conspiracy against him on the Internet, involving the Central Intelligence Agency
Central Intelligence Agency
The Central Intelligence Agency is a civilian intelligence agency of the United States government. It is an executive agency and reports directly to the Director of National Intelligence, responsible for providing national security intelligence assessment to senior United States policymakers...

 and Opus Dei
Opus Dei
Opus Dei, formally known as The Prelature of the Holy Cross and Opus Dei , is an organization of the Catholic Church that teaches that everyone is called to holiness and that ordinary life is a path to sanctity. The majority of its membership are lay people, with secular priests under the...

. The victim was charged for elaborate and unnecessary computer security services, including the claim that a member of the India
India
India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...

n military had been sent to Honduras to investigate the source of the virus. The alleged scam lasted from August 2004 through October 2010 and is estimated to have cost the victim between 6–20 million USD. The victim later stated that he had been defrauded by "grifters of the highest order".

See also

  • Advance fee fraud
    Advance fee fraud
    An advance-fee fraud is a confidence trick in which the target is persuaded to advance sums of money in the hope of realizing a significantly larger gain...

  • Chain letter
    Chain letter
    A typical chain letter consists of a message that attempts to the recipient to make a number of copies of the letter and then pass them on to as many recipients as possible...

  • Curse
    Curse
    A curse is any expressed wish that some form of adversity or misfortune will befall or attach to some other entity—one or more persons, a place, or an object...

  • Oxford Capacity Analysis
    Oxford Capacity Analysis
    The Oxford Capacity Analysis , also known as the American Personality Analysis, is a list of questions which is advertised as being a personality test and that is administered for free by the Church of Scientology. The OCA test is offered by the Church of Scientology online, at its local churches,...

  • Quackery
    Quackery
    Quackery is a derogatory term used to describe the promotion of unproven or fraudulent medical practices. Random House Dictionary describes a "quack" as a "fraudulent or ignorant pretender to medical skill" or "a person who pretends, professionally or publicly, to have skill, knowledge, or...

  • Rogue security software
  • Virus hoax
    Virus hoax
    A computer virus hoax is a message warning the recipient of a non-existent computer virus threat. The message is usually a chain e-mail that tells the recipient to forward it to everyone they know.-Identification:...

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