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California Psychic Takes the Money and Runs

William Parcher

Show me the monkey!
William Parcher
Joined
Jul 26, 2005
Messages
27,471
Cops hunt for 'psychic', 29, who disappeared after 'scamming clients out of $100,000 by promising to take their cash and bless it before returning double the amount'

Daily Mail said:
A 29-year-old woman in California claiming she was a 'psychic', duped clients out of $100,000 after she accepted the cash with the promise of blessing and doubling the amount, police said.

Perlita Afancio-Balles landed on the 'most wanted' list at the Sacramento Police Department Tuesday for the alleged scheme.

Clients who said they handed over the money to Afancio-Balles, said she asked them to return to her home days later to get double a return on their investment, but when she did, the alleged psychic was gone.

The victims said her residence was vacated and she and their money had disappeared, according to an online account from cops...
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https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/ar...king-100-000-clients-promising-double-it.html

Some other psychic should be able to locate her.
 
It was clearly an alien abduction and she insisted her furniture must be taken also.

Can they not see the obvious?
 
You can hardly blame her. If a bunch of drooling idiots starts queing up, offering up their money, then what's a psychic to do? She's saved them the embarrassment of losing that money to ten-year-old Nigerian princes.
 
This is such an old scam, remember reading about it even here a decade or so ago.

It's an example in my opinion how magic belief in one area can affect other areas of your life.

One of the avenues these scammers use to get the money is based on "prosperity" Christianity, if you've bought into (as part of your religion) that Jesus will give back $3 for ever $1 you donate than this stops sounding as crazy.
 
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Darat said:
One of the avenues these scammers use to get the money is based on "prosperity" Christianity, if you've bought into (as part of your religion) that Jesus will give back $3 for ever $1 you donate than this stops sounding as crazy.
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When I turn on the TV early in the morning before work, one of the cable networks is often showing a televangelist who is constantly talking about "sowing seeds". Send him money and God will eventually reward you with much more money.

Checking online, it's a guy named Mike Murdock, who appears to base his entire operation around that concept.
 
John Oliver did a segment on that and then, to show how easy and legal it is, set up his own church. He eventually gave the money to Doctors Without Borders.

Fred
 
Do the victims bare some responsibility? I know it's frowned on to blame the victim, but in this case, what the hell were they doing giving a stranger a large sum of money?
 
wasapi said:
Do the victims bare some responsibility? I know it's frowned on to blame the victim, but in this case, what the hell were they doing giving a stranger a large sum of money?
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I want to say yes and no. I would hope someone wouldn't be so ignorant as to fall for type of scam but I can't blame them if someone took advantage of their ignorance and scammed them. The blame for the dishonesty is entirely with the scammer.
 
Armitage72 said:
When I turn on the TV early in the morning before work, one of the cable networks is often showing a televangelist who is constantly talking about "sowing seeds". Send him money and God will eventually reward you with much more money.

Checking online, it's a guy named Mike Murdock, who appears to base his entire operation around that concept.
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How is it that these televangelist prosperity gospel preachers crooks can get away with this and the psychic woman not? Wouldn't be because they are Christian would it?
 
wasapi said:
Do the victims bare some responsibility? I know it's frowned on to blame the victim, but in this case, what the hell were they doing giving a stranger a large sum of money?
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If you subscribe to the belief that those who fall for these scams are motivated partly by greed, then you can argue that the moral calculus here is not as one-sided as it appears. It's natural to want something for nothing, or for very little. But at what point does that desire become morally indefensible?

Legally speaking, if you promise to return double someone's money and you don't, you'll have a hard time showing you didn't defraud him. There's clearly far more malice on the perpetrator's side than on the victim's side. But the perpetrator's success depends on creating the illusion of a reasonable reliance. For the prosperity types, the scam is fashioned as something God wants for you. "Oh, I'm not being greedy then." As Darat commented, it's very easy to play on people's preconceptions -- whatever they are -- and make the proposed reliance sound reasonable.
 
A good variation of this trick is persuade people to send you $10. You return $20. They send you $100 and you return $200. They also spread the word around about you. Heaps of people start sending you big $. Then you collect the money and run.
 
Well, if you're going to defraud people of large sums of money, I wouldn't recommend hanging around after you do it.
 
Craig4 said:
Well, if you're going to defraud people of large sums of money, I wouldn't recommend hanging around after you do it.
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Perhaps her psychic powers warned her of a long break away from the world if she stayed around....
 
Wow. It just takes one bad psychic to mess up the reputation of all psychics. Oh, wait . . .
 
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