NYC psychic curse-removal fraud (5-15 yrs)
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Core record
Evidence status
Convicted
Authority role
See cited record
Organization
No organization assigned
Archive classification
This is the archive's application of its published inclusion test. The cited record appears below.
The fraud depended on claims that the victim faced a curse or harmful energy and had to pay the purported psychic to remove it.
- Curse or witchcraft threat
- Prosperity, divination, or curse-removal claim
Cited record
Sources
- high quality reporting disposition CBS News / Associated Press, “NYC psychic gets 5 to 15 years in prison for conning clients” (Nov. 14, 2013).
The contemporaneous report records Sylvia Mitchell’s grand-larceny conviction, five-to-fifteen-year sentence, restitution order, and evidence that clients paid to remove negative energy.
Source provenance
Source access and integrity log
This log records source retrieval and file integrity. It does not mean that an automated process independently confirmed every statement in the source.
- Source and tier basis
- https://www.cbsnews.com/news/sylvia-mitchell-update-sorry-nyc-psychic-gets-5-to15-years-in-prison-for-conning-clients/ Corpus classification: high-quality-reporting; evidentiary role: disposition. SHA-256 a228bebbd90118dddbc633aa059eb5fe1da60ec2b964dd6ffc49c58162d22bdf
- Retrieval
- 2026-07-20 · Preserved
- Bound by Fear automated source-preservation ledger
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Related record
Related cases · Divination and fortune-telling services
- 2004 · Kenner, LA, USA Louisiana curse-removal fraud convictions
- 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