A copywriter swindled victims out of $200M by pretending to be a psychic

Practically speaking, they charged for a service with given parameters -- So-and-so will perform the reading personally -- and did not appropriately deliver on the purchased service.

This is not a case where someone is being discriminated against unlawfully because they consider Psychic Reading to be their religion, which is what laws would traditionally protect against.

Maybe the defendant could try to say that the victims (for lack of a less leading word) were just practicing the religion and, if they agreed, maybe that's actually what happened. That doesn't appear to be what happened.

How is this different from any other type of marketing?

"We will use our special|professional|proprietary|psychic knowledge of the market in order to make your product sell better"

On the one hand marketing is critical for any business, they do need to sell things after all. On the other, the marketing group is really good at selling things, most importantly themselves, that is, selling how good they are at selling things.

The HN title is inaccurate. He didn't simply pretend to be psychic, but rather pretended to be one particular psychic, fraudulently using their name and image for profit.

There aren't real psychics nor real psychic readings

A lot of these comments are jumping to victim-blaming, but the headline doesn't really describe the fraud. The article says the fraud they were prosecuted for wasn't even for the "psychic" services. The fraudster took a famous psychic's likeness and purported to be selling interactions with her, when in fact the letters were being destroyed and the responses were mass produced copy. Obviously "psychics" aren't real, but that doesn't mean anyone committing fraud around psychic services gets a free license to swindle customers.

The prosecution's concluding remarks are a good statement about this:

> The prosecution concluded with a simple argument: “We all have beliefs,” lawyer Charles Dunn told the jury. “You may think my beliefs are crazy. I could have the same opinion about your beliefs. We may think other people are foolish for what they believe. That’s okay. That’s not a crime. What’s not okay is taking advantage of people because of what they believe. What’s not okay is lying to them because you think they’re a fool. And it is criminal, it is a crime when you lie to them about their beliefs and take their money.”