What happens when a “spell” is fake, but the money is very real?  In a courtroom, the answer may be more complicated than you would expect.  Florida psychic Rose Marks built a business around curses, spiritual “cleansing,” and supernatural remedies.  Among her clients was romance novelist Jude Deveraux, who testified that Marks convinced her she was secretly exchanging romantic emails with Brad Pitt and Colin Powell and, after the death of Deveraux’s young son, that the boy’s spirit could be transferred into another person’s body.[i]  In 2013, a federal jury convicted Marks on all fourteen counts arising from the fortune-telling fraud scheme, and she was ultimately sentenced to just over ten years.[ii]  But here’s the strange part: the government never had to prove that the spells were fake.

The First Amendment makes the line surprisingly blurry.  Fortune-telling at its core is a way of sharing predictions, spiritual beliefs, or supernatural insights with a customer.  However, when money changes hands, the government may have a legitimate interest in regulating what happens on the other side of the crystal ball.  In Nefedro v. Montgomery County, the Maryland Court of Appeals ruled against a county ordinance that banned fortune-telling for compensation, classifying the practice as protected speech.[iii]  However, the court distinguished between fortune-telling itself and any fraudulent activities that might occur in connection with it.[iv]  Simply put, while the Constitution does not authorize the government to prohibit fortune-telling, it also does not give the fortune-teller a constitutional exemption from fraud law.

But there is a problem with deciding where belief ends and fraud begins: what happens when the alleged fraud depends on a claim about the supernatural itself?  The Supreme Court faced a similar problem in United States v. Ballard, where defendants claimed to possess divine healing powers.  The Court held that a jury could not be asked to determine whether the defendants’ religious beliefs were actually true.[v]  The government could examine whether the defendants sincerely believed what they preached, but it could not turn the courtroom into a theological debate over whether their supernatural claims were true.[vi]  That is the trap at the heart of psychic fraud prosecutions: if the government has to prove that a supernatural claim is false before it can call that claim fraudulent, the courtroom suddenly becomes a place where the government decides what counts as magic, religion, or delusion.

But “false” does not automatically mean “fraudulent.”  In United States v. Alvarez, the Supreme Court rejected the idea that the government may punish speech simply because it is false.[vii]  The Court nevertheless recognized that some categories of false speech, including fraud, fall outside ordinary First Amendment protection.[viii]  That distinction matters for psychic services.  Suppose a fortune-teller predicts that a customer will meet a tall, dark stranger next Tuesday.  Tuesday comes; no stranger.  She was wrong, but being wrong is not a crime.  Now suppose a fortune-teller says she will hold the customer’s savings until the curse lifts, knowing she never plans to return a cent.  The prediction itself was never the problem; the lie about the money was, and a prosecutor can prove that lie without ever asking whether the curse existed.

Consider United States v. Runner, decided by the Second Circuit in 2025.  Customers opened letters falsely bearing the name of the well-known psychic “Maria Duval,” which claimed that she had a vision about them personally and that a “windfall” might be coming.[ix]  Duval, however, had no involvement in the mailings; Runner and other copywriters wrote them.[x]  The letters were mass-produced, and the personalized readings customers paid for were anything but personal.[xi]  Over roughly twenty years, the operation took more than $150 million from over a million customers in the United States and Canada, who paid for “personalized psychic services that were never rendered” and for supposedly rare objects that were, in the court’s words, “junk.”[xii]  The crystals came from PartyMart and the rings cost $2.81 each.[xiii]  The Second Circuit upheld the fraud convictions, explaining that the jury could find that Runner intentionally lied to induce customers to pay for something they would not actually receive.[xiv]  The court did not have to decide whether psychic powers exist, only whether Runner lied about what he was selling.

Psychic fraud is not a thing of the past.  In June 2026, federal prosecutors indicted a Texas couple for accused of running a psychic fraud scheme that took more than $2.5 million from at least three victims.[xv]  According to prosecutors, one victim allegedly wired more than $2.1 million to purchase gold coins that were purportedly “needed for cleansing ceremonies.”[xvi]  A second victim allegedly paid $86,000 for cleansing services, while a third supposedly took out loans to purchase a Corvette and gave the defendants access to credit cards to pay supposed “karmic debts.”[xvii]  The allegations are striking, but the legal theory is familiar: prosecutors did not need to prove that curses or karmic debt were imaginary.  They needed to prove that the defendants knowingly used false representations to obtain their victims’ money.

So where should the line fall?  Not at whether magic is real, as Ballard took that question off the table.[xviii]  It should fall at deception.  The government should not need to prove that a psychic cannot communicate with the dead, predict the future, or remove a curse before bringing a fraud case.  Instead, prosecutors can focus on representations that can be tested without settling the supernatural question: whether the psychic actually provided the service advertised, whether the money was used as promised, whether the supposedly personalized communication was actually personalized, or whether the psychic knowingly lied about some other material fact to induce payment.  The supernatural claim can remain a mystery; the transaction cannot.

Rose Marks’ case, therefore, presents a useful warning about where the First Amendment’s protection of supernatural expression should end.  Runner shows that the warning still holds today.  The government did not need to prove that Marks’ curses were imaginary, just as it does not need to prove that every psychic prediction is impossible.  More than a decade later, the Second Circuit upheld Runner’s fraud convictions without ever asking whether anyone can actually see the future.  It was enough that the “personalized” readings were not personalized and the services customers paid for were never rendered.  The Texas couple’s case will likely turn on the same question: not whether a curse can be cleansed, but whether the defendants knowingly lied to take their victims’ money.  The line, in other words, falls where an extraordinary claim becomes a materially false one designed to obtain money.  That distinction protects both sides of the equation: a person remains free to believe in the supernatural, and even sell it, while the government remains free to prosecute a con.  The law can leave the spirits to the séance and the fraud to the courtroom.

[i] See Psychic Swindler Sentenced to 10 Years – Did She See It Coming?, CPA Prac. Advisor (Mar. 3, 2014), https://www.cpapracticeadvisor.com/2014/03/03/psychic-swindler-sentenced-to-10-years-did-she-see-it-coming/14518/ [https://perma.cc/6VS9-XHNR] (reporting Jude Deveraux’s testimony concerning Marks’ claims about Deveraux’s supposed correspondence with Brad Pitt and Colin Powell and the transfer of her deceased son’s spirit into another person’s body).

[ii]  See U.S. Att’y’s Off., S. Dist. of Fla., Jury Convicts Defendant in $25 Million Fraud Scheme, U.S. Dep’t of Just. (Sep. 26, 2013), https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdfl/pr/jury-convicts-defendant-25-million-fraud-scheme [https://perma.cc/CZS4-Z7R9] (announcing Marks’ conviction); see also Psychic Swindler Sentenced to 10 Years – Did She See It Coming?, supra note i (reporting that Marks “was sentenced to just over 10 years in federal prison . . .”).

[iii] See Nefedro v. Montgomery Cnty., 414 Md. 585, 608 (2010) (holding that a county ordinance banning fortune-telling for compensation violated the First Amendment because fortune-telling is protected speech).

[iv] Id. at 599–600 (rejecting the argument that fortune-telling is inherently fraudulent and recognizing that some fortune-telling constitutes protected, nonfraudulent speech).

[v] See United States v. Ballard, 322 U.S. 78, 85–86 (1944) (holding that the truth or falsity of the defendants’ religious doctrines could not be submitted to the jury for determination).

[vi] Id. at 86–88 (approving the trial court’s decision to limit the jury to whether the defendants honestly, and in good faith, believed their claims).

[vii] See United States v. Alvarez, 567 U.S. 709, 719–22 (2012) (rejecting the argument that false statements, as a category, fall outside First Amendment protection).

[viii] Id. at 717–19 (listing fraud among the historically unprotected categories of speech); see also id. at 734 (Breyer, J., concurring in the judgment) (noting that “[f]raud statutes . . . typically require proof of a misrepresentation that is material, upon which the victim relied, and which caused actual injury”).

[ix] See United States v. Runner, 143 F.4th 146, 150 (2d Cir. 2025) (describing mass-mailed letters signed in Maria Duval’s name that promised customers personal visions and a coming “windfall”).

[x] Id. at 159 (“But in reality, neither Duval nor any other named psychic was involved in producing these letters. The jury heard that some were written by copywriters, and many were written by Runner himself.”).

[xi] Id. at 151 (explaining that Duval was not involved in the mailings and that the “personalized” materials were generated by entering customers’ questionnaire answers into a computer).

[xii] Id. at 150 (describing an operation that collected more than $150 million from over one million customers for purportedly rare objects and personalized psychic services that were not actually provided).

[xiii] Id. at 152–53 (describing the allegedly rare objects as inexpensive, mass-produced trinkets, including crystals purchased from PartyMart and rings costing $2.81 each).

[xiv] Id. at 158–59 (explaining that the jury could find Runner “had used these letters to lie ‘intentionally . . . to induce’ potential customers ‘into a transaction that [would] cost [them] money’ . . .” and that “what was advertised and sold here was intentionally false”).

[xv] See U.S. Att’y’s Off., W. Dist. of Wash., Texas Couple Indicted for Psychic Fraud Scheme Allegedly Stealing Millions from Vulnerable People, U.S. Dep’t of Just. (June 10, 2026), https://www.justice.gov/usao-wdwa/pr/texas-couple-indicted-psychic-fraud-scheme-allegedly-stealing-millions-vulnerable [https://perma.cc/EC8V-EF6X] (announcing an indictment alleging that two defendants defrauded at least three victims of $2.5 million through a purported psychic-services scheme).

[xvi] Id. (stating in the release’s subheading that a Washington State victim sent more than $2 million); see also Emmanuel Rivas Valenzuela, Frisco Couple Ran $2.5 Million Psychic Fraud Scheme to Clear Victims of ‘Karmic Debt,’ Feds Say, Kera (June 15, 2026 at 10:50 CDT), https://www.kera.org/2026/06/15/frisco-couple-ran-2-5-million-psychic-fraud-scheme-to-clear-victims-of-karmic-debt-feds-say/ [https://perma.cc/WE6K-UHZY] (“One victim allegedly wired more than $2.1 million to purchase gold coins that Evans claimed were needed for cleansing ceremonies. Prosecutors say the victim was instructed to mail or personally deliver the coins to Evans.”).

[xvii] See U.S. Att’y’s Off., W. Dist. of Wash., supra note xv (alleging that a second victim paid $86,000 for cleansing services and that a third victim was induced to take out loans to purchase a Corvette for a defendant and provide access to credit cards to pay supposed “karmic debts”).

[xviii] See Ballard, 322 U.S. at 85–86 (concluding that the First Amendment precluded the jury from determining whether the defendants’ asserted religious doctrines were true).