This Fake Witch Is Trying To Scam You

For a long time, tarot and magic were looked upon as scams in and of themselves, with practitioners seen as little more than snake oil hucksters. This week, on our 100th episode, we take a look at a group of people who are taking advantage of all the dedication it’s taken to legitimize this work — a group that the online intuitive community has come to refer to, singularly, as “the scammer.” As we dive into the phenomenon of these imitation Instagram accounts (you know the ones — they DM you, impersonating witches, tarot readers, and psychics, trying to scam you out of money in exchange for a fake reading), we discover that the issue is about much more than dollars — it’s about who holds the power.

Michelle Tea: Hey everyone, welcome to another episode of Your magic. I’m Michelle Tea and I’m here to tell you that it’s not just any episode — it’s our one-hundredth episode! Your Magic is a centenarian. Thank for being here with us to celebrate it. To mark the occasion, we’re going to switch up our usual format, and briefing you this very special report.

[Music]

Querent: Hi. So I was just listening to podcasts. I think I'm doing this right. I'm not really sure, but I just felt like I should go out on a whim and call and share kind of like my what I've been struggling with recently because it's almost like... It's an existential loneliness? 

Querent: Hi. Um, I need to see if I can get my card pulled about a situation. I ended a relationship.

Querent: The reason I am calling is because I'm having trouble with, um, deciding what to do with the person that I'm seeing.

Querent: I have been working in an industry that has never fulfilled me personally. 

Querent: My tarot question is, I'm having a hard time with work and life. I just got diagnosed with borderline personality disorder and bipolar disorder. 

Querent: I need some tough love about this girl who I am head over heels in. 

Querent: I've been in a serious relationship for about two years and I don't really know where it's going. 

Querent: I would love to ask the tarot, um, how I can best use my voice in a way that is good for all beings. 

Querent: Having a really hard time finding a job and staying in a job. 

Querent: Hello! Um, yeah, I'm calling because my question for the tarot is love related, of course. 

Querent: So I was wondering if you can help me see where I should kind of go, you know, what my career path should be? 

Querent: As a person who reads tarot for other people, very rare that somebody reads tarot for me. Could be kind of cool if I got some of that help back. 

Querent: Hi. I'm just a little bit scared, and I guess I want to know if I need to be scared or if I can, you know, let go and. 

[Music]

Querent: Hi. So I hate my job and I hate working and I hate living in a capitalist society. And I want to quit. I want to leave, I want to be done and I want to just go. But unfortunately, there are bills to be paid. 

[Music]

Michelle Tea: Those voices are Your Magic listeners who phoned into a tarot hotline we had up about a year ago. You can hear in their tones and inflection how vulnerable it is to seek guidance from the tarot, and those who read the cards. You’re trusting a virtual stranger. And, even more profound, you’re trusting that the Universe is somehow conscious of us, that something is listening, that our fates are somewhat knowable. When people talk about faith, this is what they’re talking about. It’s a tender spot to be in — in some kind of pain, stuck in a quandary, and reaching out to the unknown for divine direction.

Now, imagine someone taking advantage of a person while they are in this fragile, desperate state. Stoking their fears, feeding into their worst-case scenarios, and then promising they can whisk all the bad vibes away, for a price, right now, on the double. Hmmmm, what could make this situation a little more gross? How about they’re hiding their true identity, and pretending to be an intuitive you admire on Instagram? How about they reach out to you, and they tell you that the ancestors told them you need help, or spirit put their name in your ear, and they know you need help — may they help you? Well, who doesn’t need help! And how dazzling it is to be contacted directly by this cool, witchy person. Sure. I’ll Venmo you sixty dollars. On the double.

If you were to call such a person a monster, I wouldn’t argue with you. But in the online intuitive community, we call them The Scammer.

[Music]

Sabrina Scott: I'm Sabrina Scott. I'm a professional tarot readers spiritual teacher, also doing a Ph.D. in science as one does, and I write books about magic and spirituality.

Michelle Tea: I’m a big fan of Sabrina’s - I’d actually been wondering how to have her on the show, when one day I opened up my Instagram messages, and found one from her.

Hello Beloved, she began. I was drawn to you by my ancestors, are you interested in getting a reading from me? 

Wild! I thought. Sabrina’s ancestors are tuned into me! Cool! 

Sure, yeah, but I really want to have you on the show, too! I was just thinking about you!

Yes, dear, she responded. Spirit has much for me to share with you.

All it took was that next weird little line of text for my enthusiasm to deflate, punctured by a red flag. 

‘Dear?’ For that matter, ‘Beloved?’ Sabrina does not talk like this, like some smarmy, slightly creepy woo-cliche, leading with messages from ‘spirit’ and ‘ancestors.’ I sighed, and started an email.

Sabrina, I typed, We’re not actually having a conversation on Instagram right now, are we?

Sabrina Scott: Yeah, this has been going on for more than a year. It's been happening for a really long time to myself and a lot of other folks in the kind of spiritual witchy where we would tarot scene.

This has been going on for more than a year. It's been happening for a really long time to myself and a lot of other folks in the kind of spiritual witchy where we would tarot scene. And I think actually other kind of subcultural communities as well, weirdly on on Instagram specifically. So what's happening is people will reproduce all of your photos, make a fake account that's like kind of like your username, but not quite. There's like an extra letter or like an underscore or a number. And then they will obsessively follow all your followers and then slide into their DMs with a creepy message being like greetings, beloved or grand rising or some other like weird, weird thing that, like no one would ever say. And then they basically invite people for a tarot reading or a palm reading or something. But it's often tarot, and they will say, if you just Venmo, my friend or PayPal my friend I will read for you. 

Michelle Tea: Yep, this is exactly what Fake Sabrina said to me. And not just fake Sabrina, but Fake Sarah Potter, Fake Cult Mother — other tarot reading icons of Instagram. I could spot them for what they were, now, and I told them, plainly, to fuck off, and then I reported them. Glad I’m not getting taken for a ride!

Then, one day, I’m scrolling through my account, and I notice I’ve been followed by Laurie Cabot. THE Laurie Cabot! Anyone from New England knows The Official Witch of Salem, Massachusetts. Laurie has long been an icon, in the 70s and 80s for wearing her black robes through the streets and curing the Boston Red Sox of their losing streak (Google it!); today for for her gorgeous Advanced Style: Witch Edition lewks, all wild hair spiral-tattooed face. I’ve loved her since I was a teenager, and it felt like I’d really arrived in some sort of unofficial hall of official witchery to be followed on Instagram by the Grand-Witch.

Except, Laurie Cabot was not following me. At all. A scammer was.

Sabrina Scott: Unfortunately, I feel part of it is that people want to feel special, people want to feel chosen. And so when the scammer reaches out to them and is like, I've noticed your energy, there's something weird with you. I need to communicate some kind of message to you. People are like, Oh shit, I'm special. I'm chosen by someone who I really look up to. Amazing. Please take my money. And then, unfortunately, the scammer disappears. 

Michelle Tea: I think that, when we decide to practice magic, when we decide to partake in it even a little, to just believe in it, we are giving voice to a hunch we have - that we are special. If the Universe is full of mystic energy, and we believe that a flower might have a unique and holy essence, that a bird could be a messenger from another realm, we can believe in our own unique goodness. I feel like most witchy practices encourage us towards this kind of self-love, in a world where, you know, we’re often disregarded, made to feel not-special. So into this realm, this magic space we’ve created, online and each other’s minds, comes this really sinister way to prey on the way we’ve built each other up. Because we are all special, right? And so much of life is just waiting for the right people to recognize that.

Sarah Potter: I'm Sara Potter, and I am a psychic medium and tarot reader based in New York City.

Michelle Tea: Sara is another tarot witch who I’m a big fan of. I’ve been contacted countless times by scammers appropriating her account, reaching out to me with their weird-ass language. 

Sarah Potter:  Oh, I mean, I've lost count, I there's probably been a hundred more than a hundred at one time I looked and there were six people impersonating me at one time. 

Michelle Tea: A single scammer can do a lot of damage; multiply that and the damage grows. The amount of time Sara, Sabrina and other readers have  spent just responding to Instagram followers who reach out about having been approached by a possible scammer, it can take an hour out of your day, easy. Then there’s the weirdness that happens when someone pretending to be you reaches out to a somewhat estranged family member, a frenemy or an ex. That’s a whole other level of messy clean-up. 

But here’s the real slap in the face: for a long time, tarot and magic were looked upon as scams in and of themselves, practitioners little more than snake oil hucksters. It’s taken a lot of effort and dedication to legitimize this work, and all intuitives still struggle against mainstream perception that our services are illegitimate, our skills fakery. Add an actual scammer impersonating you to this mix, and it feels really, really icky.

Sarah Potter: It's hard enough sometimes telling people I'm a psychic for a living. And I mean, I'm very proud of what I do, but I have changed my entire life to support being this like true vessel to receive the messages. And, you know, take really good care of myself because I really care about what I do and anyone who gets a reading for me and to just have all of these people impersonate me, use my photos, use my likeness, contact people who follow me. It's hurtful and it's frustrating and I'm angry. 

Michelle Tea: The obvious question here is, can you just report this to Instagram and have them take it down. But this is much more difficult that clicking a button, or even filling out a form. While it’s most effective to report an impersonator from your own account, most scammer preemptively block who they’re cloning, so you can’t get to them. Folks like Sabrina Scott have created spare accounts just to report the scammer from, but the clone accounts aren’t removed with any urgency. What does work better is the majorly labor-intensive task of copy and pasting the URL for every photo the scammer has stolen, one by one, and reporting them for copyright infringement. Just sending in the URL to the account doesn’t work. And, if there are 50 of your stolen photos up there, you must report all fifty, individually. Instagram will only remove the ones that have been properly reported, no matter how obvious it may be that the account they’re reprimanding is one-hundred-percent fraudulent. 

Now, if the original account is verified, it’s of course way easier to see if the psychic who just reached out to you is legit or not - just look for the iconic blue check mark, affirming that the account has been vetted by Instagram and is the real deal. But every practitioner I have spoken to has tried and failed to get that legitimizing blue check next to their name. And, no matter how much press they have gotten, no matter how many celebrity clients go to bat for them, they get turned down. Sabrina Scott joked that if she had a shot of tequila for every time she’d tried to get verified, well, you can guess what sort of state she’d be in. 

Here she is again:

Sabrina Scott: I've tried so many time and like I've been featured in like, I don't know, like I've got two vice documentaries. I've got another documentary about me that has like three million views on YouTube, like I've written for Vice. Like I've been featured in BBC like nylon, Refinery29. Like what else I want you to do? Maybe Instagram feels like spirituality is a scam and so we’re not going to verify these people.

Michelle Tea: We reached out to Meta to get more information on how they go about their verification process, but they did not respond. With no help from Instagram, practitioners are having to figure out ways to respond to what feels like a never-ending crisis on their own.

[Music}

Marcella Kroll: So I am doing this live because I got so much information in the past 24 hours about one of my scammers. You know there’s multiples and its happening to like every spiritual account.

Michelle Tea: Marcella is a hereditary oracle, a deck creator, an artist and an autistic human. I really love her Instagram presence, the pictures she posts about her adorable lizard familiar, and her overall tough-loving joyful vibe; like most intuitives, the platform is obviously a big part of her business. Still, she has repeatedly opted to silence her account, for her own mental health. 

Marcella Kroll: Like I could feel myself. Being like, I don't like it was really messing with my my nervous system and everything. And it wasn't just like, oh, scammers, it's the amount of DMs and messages like from people who, while well-meaning, want to help are also stressing you out because they're getting like, Oh, is this you? Is this you? And you're posting a million things and then you're seeing your follower count drop because people are annoyed because you're just posting about the scammer. And it's like, you can't win.

Michelle Tea: Opting out is one way to deal with it, though not necessarily a sustainable one. Another way, tried by many practitioners, is to attempt to make contact with the Scammers themselves, hoping to trigger some conscience through a human-to-human heart-to-heart - or, to scare them with the threat of some good, old-fashioned hexing and cursing. I mean - Scammers, do you get that you’re fucking with actual witches?

Sarah Potter: I mean, I'm totally doing magic at my altar against them. Absolutely. And, you know, best wishes. 

Michelle Tea: For others, it’s just too tempting not to mess with the Scammers on the material plane.

Sabrina Scott: I've been chatting with a few other folks who have been dealing with this and we've found some of their info, and some of them were eBay sort of like Nigeria or something. And I found one of the girls doing it to me, her address in the Bronx. Someone else I know found a scammer address, and I can't remember it was North Carolina or South Carolina. So like, there's a whole bunch of these women kind of all over who are doing this weird scam thing. 

Michelle Tea: That’s Sabrina. While we can’t verify that all of the scammers are women, through a lot of detective work, some were definitely proven to be. With the help of a friend a scammer was trying to swindle, Marcella was actually able to get quite a bit of info about one such impersonator. 

Marcella Kroll: ‘I am a really good detective and I’m not gonna dox my impersonator. Why? Because here’s why: today what I’m going to do Jasmine, I’m gonna do a reading for you. And I’m gonna do a reading to look at why…’

Michelle Tea: And she knows first hand the particular traumas of being raised by a parent making a living out of lies and bad vibes.

Marcella Kroll: ‘I know that you have a kid. And how I’ve got really good experience about this is because guess what? I’m the child of a scammer! Yes I have a scamming mom and I’ve learned from the best.’ 

It's funny because just looking at like their profiles, it look like they look pretty like, Oh, you look like you're just living your life. My next step with all of that was to do a reading for them publicly via Instagram Live, hoping that they would see it. And. Employ them to get psychiatric help. Not just because of like whatever they're doing is wrong, it's like it becomes addictive. And as a child of someone who still actively does scams, that's really damaging. And I really wanted to plead that to this person about her relationship with her child and say, like, you might think that you're doing it for your kid, but you're really feeding your own addiction and issue and you're harming other people like it's beyond helping your kid at this point. 

‘Just as the child of a scammer, I just wanna say that the damage that my mother’s behavior did has to this day affected our relationship.’

I shared links to free or low cost therapy And, you know, just like also really wanting to look into the psyche of this person and maybe give them some helpful kind of be like, hey, like, here's your window like to to kind of open up or step through this different. Maybe look at this in a different way because I felt like this person was actually quite smart and intelligent, but they were sloppy. And, you know, like what's going to happen if you get caught and you go to jail and then you can't help your kid? What's going to happen if you get caught and you go to jail and then you can't help your kid? What happens if you flash forward to, 0 something years from now and you and your kid are estranged because you're scamming is still going on in the county's looking for you. Like, I just know from experience, the damage that in the trust and all of those things. So I hope they get help and I hope they stop. But that's all I can do at this point. 

Michelle Tea: I’m so impressed by the thoughtfulness and generosity of Marcella’s approach to the scammer. I’ve found myself in a message exchange with them a few times, and it’s hard not to just tell them to fuck off and then block them. I’m mad at them, for tagerying this community, for taking advantage of the very sweet, largely queer followers I have, for making my life hard. 

Now, to be honest, I’m not totally void of sympathy for this particular devil. Caught in capitalism, turning to crime has its own logic. I’m way too sympathetic to the many victims of this particular scam to give it a thumbs up, but I can also imagine a kind of alienated desperation that could give rise to such a plan. And I’m not without some sympathy for it.

I shared this understanding with the scammer. I also told her that, with the amount of time and energy she put in ripping people off she could be building an actual, sustainable business. Clearly she’s drawn to tarot and divination, she probably even has an actual talent under there, fighting to get out into the light. Would she please come and talk about it on my podcast?

Sure, she texted. But first you pay me one hundred dollars.

I said no. The scammers have manipulated too much money from my community. Take Pasquale. Pasquale is a new client, he doesn’t know me or how I operate. He’d message me on Instagram, and we had an in-person reading on the books for the future.

Pasquale: This copycat account looked exactly like yours, and I feel like I remember like getting a like a Instagrammer across from them. And I thought, maybe you had just like, started a new account. Because I know people sometimes get like, shut down.

Michelle Tea: That’s him. He’s talking about the day he got scammed.

Pasquale: A few weeks later on, like a Monday afternoon, this copycat you had messaged me being like, I need to move our session to now. And I was like, Oh, OK, I thought we were meeting like this upcoming Wednesday. And they were like, No, like 18 right now. 

Michelle Tea: Anyone who works with me knows I might move our session to tomorrow, or next week, because I’m an Aquarius and scheduling is hard. But I would never move it to right now. 

Pasquale: Can you do it by like phone or text or zoom? And I was like, Well, I'm like working right now, but can you do a little bit like I can do a little bit? So they just started. This person was just started messaging me and saying, like, Oh, I'm ready when you are. And I felt like, OK, like, I don't know you.

Michelle Tea: This sounds so super stressful. What a way to get a tarot reading, right?

The Scammer told Pasquale that they had to do the reading over text, and it was cheaper, just sixty dollars. They were really overwhelming and pushy with their messages, insisting he Paypal them right now. And Pasquale did, because it was the middle of his work day, and he wasn’t thinking clearly. Something didn’t feel right, but things were moving too fast for him to stop and check in with himself.

Instead of just ghosting, the Scammer started giving Pasquale an actual reading. Not with cards or anything, just off the top of her head. She told him he was surrounded by evil. 

Pasquale: It just started out negative off the bat, which was like a little suspicious to me. Like it was like you. I'm glad that you did this because you have a lot of negative energy and spirits around you like you were a curse and you were a child. And I need to help you, like, break through that.

Michelle Tea: This is classic fake psychic bullshit. Many years ago I went to a storefront psychic in New York City. I kind of knew it would be phony baloney, but I also wondered how they operated, and it was a mere five dollars to find out, so I did it. That Scammer told me that I was cursed, too, that the boy I lost my virginity to had given a photograph of me to a witch, and it was sitting on an altar covered in white powder. Now, I do think the boy I lost my virginity to did curse me for writing about what an uninspired introduction to heterosexuality it was, but I didn’t think he’d gone so far as to dabble in witchcraft about it. But the scammer insisted. She said I could rent a crystal from her for some ridiculous sum of money, and that would call off the bad vibes. I’d never even heard of renting a crystal - how ridiculous, why not just sell it to me? Ah, right, you’d have another opportunity to grift some cash off me! No way, lady. I got out of there relatively unscathed. But, Pasquale. He still sort of thought he could be talking to me, his friendly neighborhood queer witch, vetted by his community.

The scammer asked Pasquale if he was ‘going through anything’ which, like, who isn’t? In Pasquale’s case, he was struggling though a breakup. The Scammer hopped right onto that. She told him the spirits were making it harder for him, and that for another hundred dollars she could make him a cleansing potion.

Pasquale: And I was like, OK. And it's just another hundred dollars. I was like, OK, wait, why? And they're like, Don't worry about the price. Just worry about that. You need this time. 

Michelle Tea: This was when Pasquale started to know with more certainty that it wasn’t me he was talking to, but a rabid, thirsty Scammer.

Pasquale: Wait a second, you're not Michelle, like, you are a cop. You don't have like some followers like you're. It's not. It's like there's like a letter off. They were like, I don't know what you're talking about, like, why are you getting so aggressive? 

Michelle Tea: Goddamn these creeps. Hearing about what Pasquale went through, having people message me saying, Hey, I want a reading from you, but I have to wait because I just spent all my money on the scammer by mistake - ugh, it kills all sympathy and just makes me want to get in a fistfight with these jerks.

Every time I hear it, my first impulse is to give that person who got scammed an actual reading, for free. But I can’t. It’s just not sustainable for me, even as it breaks my freaking heart to hear about all the sweeties getting taken for a ride. But, I really appreciated Pasquale sharing his story with me on this podcast. So, I gave him a reading.

One night, me and my husband were sitting in bed, me playing Words with Friends, him chatting with a Scammer pretending to be me on Instagram. He was messing with them, acting like he had bodies buried somewhere and had done very bad things and could the scammer please help him? She said she could, if he would just cash app her a hundred bucks. Inspired, I put down my phone, and we changed tactics.

Me husband came clean and told her he actually was not a serial killer, but the husband of the woman she was impersonating. We told her about this podcast, and asked if we could interview her for this episode. She was immediately suspicious, accusing us of trying to set her up. I told her she could keep her camera off, alter her voice, anything. We just wanted to hear from her. What motivated her. Why was she doing this? But she refused. “You have a lot more power than me,” she typed.

[Music]

It felt nice to give Pasquale a reading, throwing a little bit of justice into the Scammers’ schema. I bet it felt nice for Marcella to offer her story and resources for help. I’m sure it felt nice for Sarah to do some work at her altar about it, and for Sabrina text these shady individuals some reality. I’m grateful they all agreed to come on this show and talk about what has been an endless, exhausting problem that hits everyone where it hurts, messing with trust and livelihood, mental health and sense of self. The scammers’ have hijacked hours of practitioners' lives, cost them and their followers real money, left people feeling bad, about themselves and about humanity, about the internet platforms we’ve allowed to become so central to our lives. 

I woke up this morning with a blue check beside my name, which both makes me less attractive to scammers, and makes it easier to stop them. I’m really fortunate; not only do I have a great and well-connected friend, I have a career outside tarot, as a writer, a whole other, not-woo professional persona to verify. For witches and intuitives who put 100 percent of their energy into their mystical calling, it’s going to be harder.

I wish I could leave you with a cool take away, a call to action, some way for us to band together and fight the Scam. Knowing about this, and telling your friends, will really help. Understanding that no practitioner will ever ever ever hit you up for a reading will help you not get scammed. Report fake accounts, and please, by all means, do not reach out to the impersonated practitioner to tell them about it. Do reach out to them for a reading, to support their services and presence in the world. Light a candle on your altars that the scammers find a different way to get by in this harsh world. 

Thanks for tuning into Your Magic. You can support us — plus get access to a whole bunch of bonus content — at patreon.com/thisisyourmagic. Thank you to those who support us — every dollar makes our work possible . Make sure you follow us on Twitter and Instagram @thisisyourmagic and subscribe to our newsletter at thisisyourmagic.com. Join us on Discord at the link in the show notes. You can rate us and subscribe right here on Spotify — do what you need to do to never miss an episode. You can email us at hello@thisisyourmagic.com, we would love to hear from you.

Your Magic is Ben Cooley, me Michelle Tea, Molly Elizalde, Tony Gannon, Vera Blossom, and our production intern Kirsten Osei-Bonsu. And our original theme music is by John Kimbrough. Thanks for listening!

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