Louisiana curse-removal fraud convictions
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Convicted
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The defendants claimed that victims were cursed and demanded money for spiritual cleansing or curse removal.
- Curse or witchcraft threat
- Prosperity, divination, or curse-removal claim
Cited record
Sources
- NOLA.com / The Times-Picayune, 'Psychic arrested in 2004 Kenner scam'. Available at: nola.com (Accessed: 14 July 2026).
New Orleans has the loudest 'voodoo' reputation in America and the thinnest actual record: a hard search of Louisiana's courts and press turns up no ritual killing or trafficking-by-coercion case that survives scrutiny. What it does turn up is curse-removal fraud — con-artistry that borrows spiritual vocabulary. A Kenner 'psychic' operating as 'Sister Gabrielle' took more than $51,000 from a victim after telling her 'she and her parents would die unless a curse on her was removed'; it was a repeat of a 1999 Baton Rouge curse-removal theft. (The lurid 'voodoo murders' of New Orleans legend — the 1911 Barnabet axe killings, the 2006 Bowen-Hall homicide — are, on inspection, press invention or mere geographic coincidence.)
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- Source and tier basis
- https://www.nola.com/news/psychic-arrested-in-2004-kenner-scam/article_1abd81bf-2b57-5769-8870-f28a0e801e42.html Legacy citation preserved without a normalized source tier or evidentiary-role code. SHA-256 b6b36ef1fabbf7177c29ad6d98521e5f32318eaad33f90224a58b44f737f5759
- Retrieval
- 2026-07-27 · Preserved
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Related record
Related cases · Divination and fortune-telling services
- 2013 · New York, NY, USA NYC psychic curse-removal fraud (5-15 yrs)
- 2024 · Washington, DC, USA DC 'psychic' $4M extortion scheme (10+ yrs)
- 2025 · Serdobsk, Penza Oblast, Russia Russia: suspended sentence for large-scale fraud by a woman posing online as 'the healer Lyudmila', who charged a disabled woman 76,000 roubles for a rite to speed up her prosthetic leg
- 2020 · Miass, Chelyabinsk Oblast, Russia Russia: two and a half years in a penal colony for a street healer who told five women in one day that a 'death curse' lay on them, removable only on unquestioning obedience
- 2019 · Kursk, Kursk Oblast, Russia Russia: two women jailed for a scripted curse-removal routine in which one posed as a healer and the other as a satisfied client, worked on elderly women in the street
- 2025 · Pavlovsk, Voronezh Oblast, Russia Russia: three years for a woman who offered a stranger a curse-removal rite, asked her to hand over her life savings to be blessed, and stole the 240,000 roubles
- 2020 · Sayanogorsk, Republic of Khakassia, Russia Russia: four years for a member of a three-role curse-removal crew — a recruiter, a corroborator and a lookout, working elderly women
- 2020 · Pavlovsk, Voronezh Oblast, Russia Russia: a 500-rouble fortune-telling offer in a shop escalated over three days into 424,000 roubles in cash, gold and household goods taken for curse-removal rites