When a Psychic Reading Costs You $740,000

In February 2013, on a visit to New York, Ruth spent an afternoon walking the streets, thinking about her divorce. She’d had a good life, once. A healthy, happy family. Beautiful children. But the past few years had been soul-crushing, and the divorce had descended into a no-holds-barred courtroom fight that had broken her family apart and made her feel hopeless and alone.

As the sky darkened, the cold air sank through Ruth’s clothes and crept across her skin. She decided to head back to her midtown hotel. When she got closer, she noticed a sign for $5 psychic readings at a storefront nearby. She hesitated. Maybe this would give her the guidance she’d been craving for so long. And if not, what was the harm? “I didn't think $5 was much to spend for hope,” she recalled.

Ruth walked up a narrow staircase to a second-floor apartment, where she was greeted at the door by a woman with dark hair and thick-framed reading glasses, who went by “Psychic Zoe.” The woman led Ruth into a tiny office with glistening purple amethysts in each corner—protective stones, she said—and they sat down together.

Ruth told her everything: about her divorce and depression, the sexual abuse in her past, and the lingering pain that racked her body after an accident years earlier. Her children had become emotionally distant, she said, and she feared she was losing them. She didn’t know how to make it right.

The psychic promised to spend that evening at her church, meditating about what to do. Ruth would need to come back to find out what she’d learned from her spiritual communications.

Walking out, Ruth felt a tiny rush of hope. The woman had shown her so much compassion—she’d really listened. It felt like the first time in years.

When she returned the next day, the diagnosis was shocking. “She told me there was an extraordinary number of curses placed on me and my family,” Ruth said. “She said she was at the top of her field, and she’d never, ever seen someone surrounded by so much evil, so much darkness.” It wasn’t a stretch for Ruth to believe she was cursed. “I was in such a vulnerable, depressed state at that time that I was looking for answers,” she said.

Zoe assured Ruth she could remove the curses: After her spiritual “work” was done, she said, Ruth would find love and her children would be happy. Her husband would even come back, if that’s what she wanted.

To make this all happen, Zoe said Ruth would need to buy gold, which was the strongest element in the universe and could create a powerful, impenetrable shield around Ruth that would protect her and her family. Zoe went into the next room and spoke with another woman. She came back holding a heavy gold chain and a collection of coins. She told Ruth she could buy one coin for each person she wanted to protect. It would only be a temporary arrangement, she said. Ruth could get her money—or the gold—back whenever she wanted. If she didn’t ask for it earlier, she would get it back by March 1, the deadline Zoe set for when the work would be completed. Before then, Zoe would need to place Ruth’s gold on an “altar” inside a special room that no one else could enter at her church in New Jersey. There, the gold would strengthen Ruth’s aura, gradually building a protective shield.

“I asked to see the alleged room, but Zoe told me that I wasn’t allowed to see or go into the room because no darkness or negativity could come in to expose or disturb the spiritual purity of the altar,” Ruth said. She eventually agreed to buy the chain and 15 coins for a total cost of about $18,000, making sure to take photos of herself with the items so she had evidence she’d bought them. “I didn’t see any harm in purchasing the coins, because they would be used temporarily to help my life,” she told me.

At a bank across the street, Zoe instructed Ruth to transfer the money into the account of a woman named Candice Sacks. On a small piece of lined paper, Zoe scrawled a handwritten receipt. (Ruth’s account is supported by court records and other pieces of evidence, including the receipt.)

Ruth flew home from New York. (She asked that identifying details, such as her real name and her hometown, be withheld.) She was shocked by what she’d done. “I remember thinking that if Zoe had scammed me out of $18,000, I would never hear from her again, since she was in New York and I was far away in another country,” she said. But her fears quickly evaporated when she got a phone call from Zoe, who soon started contacting her regularly—offering her life advice, talking to her about her divorce, and warning her about the terrible things that could happen to her if Zoe didn’t intervene.

Over the next few weeks, as Zoe’s premonitions became more and more terrifying, the relationship became a controlling one. Without spiritual help, Zoe said, Ruth could lose everything: Her children could be maimed; she might never find love; hate and unhappiness could spread through her family; the babies Ruth had miscarried could be locked in hell with Ruth’s grandparents.

“I was so sleep-deprived, because she would call me all through the night, at 1, 2, 3, 4 in the morning, terrorizing me,” Ruth said. March 1—the day Zoe had promised her troubles would be over—came and went, but Zoe insisted more work was needed. “Zoe told me she had stayed up all night for many nights doing spiritual battle for me, and the work was exhausting. She said there were so many demons she couldn’t believe it.”

Zoe convinced Ruth she would need to step up the work by buying a “golden pyramid”—a powerful spiritual tool that would be placed on sacred grounds deep in Arizona, near Tucson. It would cost $100,000 to build. (It had to be big enough to protect all of Ruth’s family members, whose names would be inscribed.) Ruth was stunned by the cost, but she trusted Zoe’s psychic abilities. Again, Ruth said she was assured she would get the money back when the work was completed. She flew back to New York and arranged the payment.

In the years that followed, Ruth said Zoe became a relentless voice in her head. She texted and called her night and day, and offered her ill-informed legal and financial advice as she navigated her messy divorce. Like a possessive partner, Ruth said, Zoe turned her against people in her life, claiming they were evil and would abandon her. Zoe told Ruth that her body was too “spiritually weak” to carry pregnancies to term, which is why she’d had miscarriages. She persuaded her to buy a 9.2-carat diamond ring. If she didn’t, Zoe said, she would never find love again. Through it all, Ruth kept feeding Zoe’s escalating requests for money, believing the psychic was helping her protect her family.

If Ruth ever voiced doubts or concerns, Zoe would always find a way to talk her down. In 2015, Ruth balked at the idea of spending $160,000 on “spiritual armor.” To soothe her, Zoe agreed to send her a “contract” in the mail, guaranteeing her work would be done by March 2016. The document arrived, signed by a notary public and a “witness” named Robin Funk. The contract’s terms were a mixture of straightforward financial provisions and private glimpses at Ruth’s innermost hopes. “I find where I belong,” one read. “Zoe will advise me and guide me for life,” read another.

On a few occasions, Ruth said, she tried to cut off contact with Zoe altogether. But no matter how toxic the relationship was, she’d put so much stock in Zoe being the one person who could save her; she didn’t feel she had the strength to deal with the relationship falling apart. If she stopped believing the bad premonitions, she thought, would that mean the good premonitions—the ones she’d spent thousands of dollars and years of her life working toward—were also lies?

By May 2016, Ruth had given Zoe a little over $740,000 in total—most of her life savings. The contract deadline had again lapsed, and Zoe had again pitched a new agreement and a new timeline, bombarding her with a flood of urgent messages. Exhausted and broke, Ruth stopped replying. She started getting ominous e-mails signed by someone named Joseph Avner, who claimed to be connected to the church. “We will have to locate one of your family members to discuss these matters asap,” one e-mail said. She started researching psychic scams online and realized that she, too, had been a victim.

It was a chastening, lonely time. She talked to a counselor, but felt judged. Then, at home on her computer one night, she came across some videos of Bob Nygaard, a private investigator known for his work on cases of psychic fraud. He was describing stories that sounded exactly like hers. She picked up the phone.

I met Nygaard last summer, in New York’s West Village. It was a balmy, pink-skied evening, and the streets were crowded with people spilling out of bars and takeaway spots, some cupping paper plates with oily slices of pizza. Nygaard was sitting in a gold Ford Fusion, watching a woman who was perched on a stool on the sidewalk right outside his car door. Next to her was a sign advertising psychic readings.

The woman was wearing a baggy red sweatshirt—she looked young. Dark brown hair framed her face, and her eyes darted over her shoulder, casting anxious glances inside the car. Nygaard, a portly, ruby-cheeked man, was wearing an NYC cap and a necklace with a silver cross that glinted in his chest hairs. Lurking in a gold rental car, he was hardly discreet. He held his phone up to his cheek and pretended to take a phone call while he snapped covert photos of the woman through his window. The whole scene felt like a bad buddy-cop movie from the ’90s.

But Nygaard was relaxed. After retiring from the Nassau County Police Department more than a decade ago at the age of 44, he had moved to Florida and prepared for a long stint of sitting on beaches. Before long, he realized he was too restless to sit around all day, and instead started working as a private investigator, specializing in confidence schemes. His interest in psychic fraud was piqued, initially, when he tried to pick up a woman at a bar in Boca Raton, and she confided in him that she’d been scammed and needed help. (The culprit, a psychic named Gina Marks, has since been arrested on charges of theft scheme and is now in prison in Maryland.)

Nygaard claims he has helped get about 40 criminal psychics convicted over the past decade—capturing the attention of global media outlets, which often note with glee that his targets really should have seen him coming. He is, by his admission, the only person in the country investigating psychic fraud full-time, traveling solo across the country regularly from his home in Florida to meet with police and prosecutors for various cases, or to testify in court. He has no wife, no children.

People in desperate situations reach out to Nygaard every day, he says, but he only takes about 10 cases a year. For each, he spends weeks or months—sometimes years—gathering bank statements, phone records, e-mails, and other pieces of evidence that his clients can present to police.

The type of justice his clients can expect depends on where they live. In New York State, fortune-telling is technically a class B misdemeanor, but at least in New York City, the law is rarely enforced; in California, fortune-telling is protected under free speech. Police records show that cases that go to court in New York City, of those psychics who go beyond $10 readings to more nefarious schemes, generally involve more serious charges, like grand larceny and scheme to defraud.

Many of the psychics Nygaard investigates have persuaded their clients to give them thousands of dollars, which they promised to return just as soon as the “curses” were lifted, or “negative energies” rebalanced. These arrangements are sometimes made after with foreboding premonitions about relationship problems, illness, and even death. “It is so deep, as far as the careful, managed manipulation that goes on,” Nygaard said. “It’s like a cult leader that has people under his control and they feel that they have to stay in the cult—but it’s one-on-one.”

Between March 2009 and March 2019, the NYPD recorded 84 arrests that included fortune-telling charges. Police reports from those arrests, obtained through a Freedom of Information request, show clear patterns. In a report from 2011, a psychic told a female client she could remove the “negative energy” affecting her relationship if she paid her $1,600 for the special crystals she needed to do her work. The report said the psychic had falsely promised she would help the victim “get back together” with the person she was having relationship problems with. Another report, from the same year, described a psychic who had promised to help a man marry his ex-girlfriend. Over a period of three years, the psychic persuaded him to bring money and expensive items to an “altar,” where they would be stored for his future married life, the report said. The man handed over a Rolex watch worth more than $8,000, two gold coins, an engagement ring, sunglasses, a “gold NYC chain,” and more than $50,000 in cash.

The stories are wild, and sometimes hard to believe. They can be easy to deride. Nygaard believes these gut reactions can affect how police officers view victims too. “It is so difficult for me to get over the hurdle of convincing police and prosecutors who aren’t in the know that someone can be duped, and a scam like this can go on for seven years or 10 years,” he said. “They can't fathom that. They just think it's completely absurd.”

In fact, anyone can fall victim to a scam or a confidence scheme, says Dr. Paul Seager, a senior lecturer at the University of Central Lancashire’s School of Psychology. It really comes down to the individual’s personal circumstances at the time the scam is presented. “We are all vulnerable,” he said. “We are not all vulnerable at the same time, but some of us are more vulnerable in certain situations than others. Those who believe in an afterlife might be more vulnerable in a psychic situation. Those of us who are worried about provisioning for our family and our future might be more vulnerable to a financial scam.”

We’re also emotionally vulnerable when good things happen, he said, like a pay rise or an unexpected windfall. When Ruth had better moments, she said Zoe took credit for them, warning her that if she stopped her spiritual journey prematurely, the blessings could cease and terrible things could happen to her and her family.

Watching an undercover video that Nygaard had shared with me, of a meeting between Zoe and an unnamed woman, I wasn’t sure if I was witnessing a sinister type of grooming or just a slightly hokey reading with all the obvious beats. Zoe—who is identified in court records as Ann Thompson, and did not respond to requests for comment—started the conversation gently, talking to the woman in a relaxed, authoritative voice about the woman’s noncommittal boyfriend, problems at her job, and the medication she took to deal with anxiety. (She’d soon be off that, Thompson promised.)

The woman had a problem inside herself, Thompson stressed—a problem that only she could solve. "When you don't have that light, you have darkness,” she said. “So, that darkness is like a negative flow around you, and people sense it, but they don't know what it is.” Behind her, misshapen purple crystals glittered from a patchwork of shelves. The sound of children playing and yelling filtered in from another room.

One common technique con artists use is to leverage the principle of reciprocity, Dr. Seager said: If someone has done something for you, you feel more obliged to do something for them. “They will give you something, give you some information, and that puts you in a state of obligation because you now feel you have to do something for them,” he said.

The woman in the video asked Thompson how much her spiritual work would cost. Thompson assured her that the price would be discounted: "For the one little crystal that I'm going to give you...let's say it's $50, which, it's actually $200, but let's just say $50. We pay $35 to make sure that our clients are able to have it and afford it,” she said. Ruth said that when she bought the gold from Thompson after her visit, she was also told she was getting a discounted price.

Psychics may also play off what psychologists call “commitment and consistency.” “We like to see ourselves as consistent people,” Dr. Seager said. “If someone asks me to do something, or answer questions, then, being the polite person I am, I will answer their questions.” This creates an opening for that person to make a connection. “So they start with something small; I go along with it. They ask me something else small; I go along with it. Then, boom, they hit me with something big, and because I'm a nice person, I'm more likely to go for it.”

It’s a bait-and-switch: For Ruth, a $5 reading became the gateway to hundreds of thousands toward her spiritual salvation.

As Nygaard and I drove through the dimming streets of downtown Manhattan, he pointed to neon signs flickering in windows and large glass shopfronts, beyond which shimmered mahogany tables and grand chandeliers. He’d investigated many of the psychic shops in the area, he said, and still kept close tabs on them. We passed a glowing red shopfront, once home to Sylvia Mitchell, a fortune-teller who served nearly five years in prison for swindling two women out of a reported $138,000. Further uptown, Nygaard pointed to a tiny storefront peeking out from under scaffolding, where psychic Priscilla Kelly Delmaro had counseled a man reportedly desperate to win his girlfriend back. She eventually persuaded him to give her hundreds of thousands of dollars. A year after Delmaro was arrested for the crime, her colleague, Christine Evans, was arrested on the street outside the shop for a separate scam. Nygaard pulled up a picture on his phone he had taken of the arrest. “Right there on the street,” he said, chuckling.

Nygaard decides what cases to take based on whether he thinks there was probable cause that a crime had been committed, and whether there is enough evidence to prove it. Sometimes he charges a flat fee, which ranges anywhere from $250 to $10,000; other times, he brokers agreements with his clients to get a cut of whatever settlements they win in court.

Over the years, Nygaard has cultivated a public persona through the media that leans heavily on a kind of Scooby Doo novelty factor: He’s known for wearing a signature fedora and beige trench coat. His clients usually learn about him in the same way Ruth did—on television or the internet.

Most of his clients are women, but they’re not the whimsical, crystal-collecting archetype you might imagine. Some are businesswomen; others are stay-at-home moms, students, or lonely tourists. What binds them is some degree of trauma, and a difficulty making sense of that trauma. When they come to Nygaard, his first question is always the same: Have you been to the police yet? Some have said no; they were too embarrassed. Others have said they did go to the police, but that they’d been laughed at and told their case was a civil matter, not a crime. It’s a point of endless exasperation, and significant venting, for Nygaard. “Not only am I fighting to get police to take these crimes more seriously, but once arrests have been made, I’m also fighting for prosecutors to negotiate better plea deals and for judges to hand down harsher sentences so that society is protected and victims are made whole,” he said. To Nygaard, these cases are white-collar crimes, pure and simple. People are losing their life savings, and no one seems to care.

Some psychics have accused him of being hypocritical, pointing out that he makes money from the same people they do. They’ve also accused him of discriminating against Romani Americans, who are over-represented in his cases and who, as a marginalized community, have long struggled with racist stereotypes about criminal behavior. In 2018, psychic Janet Lee, known as the “Greenwich Psychic,” sued Nygaard for slander, defamation, and a host of other charges, claiming his work had cost her a contract for a reality-TV series, The True Greenwich Psychic. In her complaint, she claimed Nygaard “uses his personal and racist distaste for psychics and for gypsies to harm [Janet Lee] and interfere with her right to earn a living.” (“It isn’t uncommon for members within the criminal element of the Roma community to use false allegations of racism as a cudgel against those trying to bring them to justice,” Nygaard said in response.) Last August, a Westchester County Court judge dismissed the case. Nygaard filed a counterclaim against Lee for defamation, which is ongoing.

A person familiar with Nygaard’s work told me over coffee that people shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that there are huge financial incentives for him to build his profile, and to get his clients to push for certain outcomes in their cases. “Nygaard takes advantage of the same kinds of beliefs in his clients that make them vulnerable to the very psychics that exploited them, namely by convincing them that he can deliver outlandish, improbable, or even impossible outcomes…for a fee,” he said.

Nygaard stressed that he always encouraged victims to go to the police before they hired him. The police are free of charge, he said. He isn’t.

His own experience working as a police officer had been a “rough go,” he told me, mainly because, by his account, his colleagues had taken issue with his enthusiastic approach to crime fighting. In the 1990s, he worked a series of cases involving home-improvement scams and became interested in how cons operated. He ended up joining the National Association of Bunco Investigators, a group of professionals, including many current and former law-enforcement officers, who were interested in nontraditional organized crimes. Nygaard counted its co-founder, late Baltimore detective Jon Grow, as a mentor and a friend.

But last June, he received a letter telling him his membership with the group had been revoked because of his public criticism of police and prosecutors. The rejection hurt, he said—yet another reminder that his outspoken approach was at odds with the “blue wall of silence,” as he called it. But he wasn’t going to stop talking about the issues he saw every day. The unavoidable fact, he told me, was that people needed his services. “If [the police] did their job, and when people walked into every precinct in New York City, they took it seriously and took a report, people would never call me,” he said. “I would be out of work. I don't care. I would relish the day that I get put out of work. But that’s never going to happen.” (The NYPD did not respond to requests for comment.)

When I reached Ruth by phone, she spoke in a small, wavering voice that rose and trembled with anger as she detailed the secret she’d held onto for years.

These days, after everything that transpired with Thompson, she’s scared to trust anyone—as if being gaslit for so long burned up any faith she had in her instincts for people.

She still doesn’t understand how she got so suckered into the whole thing, and as we talked through her story, it was obviously painful for her to relive it. At points she went quiet, muttering, “Oh God, oh God,” her voice rueful. She can’t shake the fear that she might have put her children at risk in some way, and after she cut ties with Thompson she took out a protection order for the children without telling them.

When Ruth hired Nygaard, she was wary. Like Thompson, he had told her he could help. Like Thompson, he also charged a fee. But as they built their investigation, untangling the layers of Thompson and Ruth’s relationship, Nygaard became a trusted confidant. Under his guidance, Ruth made contact with Thompson again, this time recording their conversations and adding the tapes to a dossier of evidence that included financial records, photos, personal notes, text messages, and other documents.

In the middle of their investigation, Nygaard was contacted by a businessman in the Midwest who said he’d also been ripped off by Thompson. His experience mirrored Ruth’s. According to the arraignment, Thompson persuaded him to buy gold coins that she said she would place in a temple for his protection. She also promised he could get his money—$72,000 in total—back at any time, the arraignment said. But after the man talked to his wife and asked for his money to be returned, Thompson’s contact tapered off. (Nygaard said the “fade out”—when a psychic slowly peels away from their client—and the “midnight move”—where they abandon their shops in the middle of the night—are common.)

Nygaard started working for the Midwestern man, too, and eventually took the evidence from both cases to a detective in the NYPD with whom he had a working relationship. Police conducted a series of search warrants, and prosecutors mounted an investigation, which found evidence that Thompson and her partners had stolen about $1 million from as many as six victims. (More victims came forward after the case was publicized, the DA's office said, bringing that count up to at least 20 and the amount stolen to more than $1 million.) By mid-2018, Thompson was being held in jail on Rikers Island, charged with a series of crimes, including grand larceny and scheme to defraud, against six victims. Three of Thompson’s accomplices, Jaycie George, Sarah Demitro, and Candice Sacks were also charged.

Thompson initially denied the charges, but later pleaded guilty. Inside a Manhattan courtroom, Justice Gregory Carro heard arguments from both sides about what kind of punishment Thompson should receive. Ruth felt confident. She thought they had a watertight case. But the justice system was more fickle and bureaucratic than she’d expected, and as the case dripped through the court, the likelihood of a lengthy prison sentence seemed to dwindle.

At a court appearance last April, Thompson was brought in handcuffed, with her arms behind her back. She was wearing khaki jail clothes, and her hair was pulled back in a low ponytail. As her lawyer made the case for more time—arguing she couldn’t come up with the money to pay her victims back—Thompson stared forward blankly while her husband sat behind her in the public gallery, his face sullen. (The first lawyer Thompson had on her case declined to comment for this story; her current lawyer did not respond to messages.)

Thompson’s accomplices each pleaded guilty to their part in the scam. A copy of the plea agreement reached by Jaycie George offered details about how it worked. The women would convince clients they were suffering from a variety of “psychic maladies," which could be cured by mystical rituals, the agreement said. “In fact, I do not have any kind of psychic power, the clients I advised were not suffering from any kind of psychic malady, and I had no intention of performing the rituals,” George stated in the agreement. The playbook seemed to have one major act: George would tell clients they were cursed and needed protection. Next, she would ask them to buy gold coins to be placed at a temple. “I intended to steal money from as many clients as I could,” she said in the agreement.

Feeling she was being shut out of discussions about the case, Ruth started to panic. The prosecution had recommended a five-to-15-year prison sentence for Thompson, unless something close to full restitution was paid, but it seemed like the judge was considering a more lenient option. Eventually, Justice Carro offered a sentence of one to three years in prison if Thompson paid $200,000 in restitution before the official sentencing date.

In e-mails with the prosecutor, Aaron Davidowitz, Ruth pleaded with him to push harder. Anything less than total restitution and a significant jail term would reward Thompson’s criminality, she said. What kind of message would it send to other psychics watching the case, not to mention victims out there trying to muster up the courage to come forward? (A representative from the District Attorney’s office told me in an e-mail that “the sentence, including the restitution amount, was dictated by the Court.”)

Although Nygaard believes the case is the largest of its kind in New York’s history, based on the number of victims, Thompson is now out of jail while her sentence is pending. She’s not living under any official supervision. Her next court appearance is scheduled for March.

These days, one of the only people Ruth confides in about her experience is Nygaard.

She’s determined to give a victim-impact statement in court and hopes telling her story will motivate the judge to hand down a tougher sentence. But she has no idea when the sentencing will actually happen, or how it will play out. So far, she said, she’s received some $25,000 from one of Thompson’s accomplices, and will receive a portion of the $155,000 that Thompson has already paid back. She still hopes to get the full $740,000 returned to her and continues to put pressure on the prosecutor, sending Nygaard regular updates.

When he became a private investigator, Nygaard perhaps didn’t anticipate that he'd become a counselor, too, spending hours on the phone most days with people grappling with financial ruin and complex feelings of shame. The weight of that responsibility seems taxing, particularly when clients pin all their hopes on his work, possibly hoping that legal vindication will heal their emotional pain too.

The stakes are high. Last October, Nygaard said he got a phone call from a man whose relative had recently taken her own life. Going through her belongings, the family had learned that the woman had been in contact with a psychic over many years, sending her large sums of money and even leaving her money in her will. They were completely unaware. At her lowest points, Ruth said she, too, considered suicide.

Nygaard sees the psychic industry as a constant revolving door, its momentum uninterrupted by the occasional criminal case or bad review. If a psychic runs into trouble with the police, they often just pick up and move to a new state; if a psychic is jailed, someone else will take over their shop. And so it goes: Without proper deterrents, Nygaard says, vulnerable people will continue to get scammed and bad actors in the industry will continue to profit, their criminal cases garnering little more than voyeuristic curiosity and should-have-known-better shrugs from the public. I wondered if our collective fascination with female con artists and “grifters” like Anna Sorokin, who fooled Manhattan’s elite into believing she was a German heiress, made it difficult for us to see the pain and financial ruin on the other side of some of these scams.

In October, I decided to visit Thompson’s shop on West 35th Street to see what had become of it since her arrest in 2018. Pushing through the throngs of commuters, I noticed a white sign out front advertising psychic readings. It was speckled with tiny red stars. At the neighboring store, a woman leaned against the exterior wall, smoking a cigarette.

The name “Zoe,” once displayed prominently, was nowhere in sight. At the top of the sign, fine letters spelled out the words: “Under New Management.”

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