The Scammers

Lemon -

Spiritual spaces are not exempt from grifters and scammers. Just like you can find bad actors anywhere else, you can also find them here (well, not here but you know what I mean). These spaces are rife with scammers.

I'm not here to harp on scammers. Right now, I want to prioritize identifying these people.

  1. The name is modified in some manner. Usually it's an additional character or two. This isn't exhaustive but here are the ones I see most often.
    • has a double of some letter already there (eg. Coonjuress JC)
    • an extra 's' (eg. Conjuresss JC)
    • the name is mixed around (eg. Conjuress JC becomes JC Conjuress)
    • underscores (eg. Conjuress_JC or ConjuressJC)
    • underscores if there were some in the original acct name (eg. Conjuress_JC becomes Conjuress__JC)
    • numbers added (eg. ConjuressJC2)
    • periods added (eg. Conjuress.JC)

This is not addressing the backup accounts that many people have as a result of social media's extensively poor practices in managing individual users. Usually, these will state that they're a backup account and match the branding of the primary account.

  1. Post history is weird
    • Upload history is all on a single day
    • Posts are missing from the actual practitioner's post history
    • There might not be any stories or videos in the post history.
  1. Follower counts are an okay marker but people CAN and DO buy followers so that's not the most reliable (e.g. one very popular conjurer commented with amusement that the scam page had more followers than she herself did).
  1. Real practitioners do not DM you to offer services if you didn't ask first. A DM from a popular page is a red flag to begin with.
    They will not just start being overly familiar with "dear" or "sweetie" or "love", etc. Nor will they just send prayers out of the goodness of their hearts for people they have never once spoken to.

I'll be sure to update this page with more observations when I notice some but for now, that's it.

If you have an account reach out to you, then search for an account similar to that name and see who's following the other one. Are there other popular people within that community? Is there any evidence of interaction beyond what they've built themselves to be (that is, some do give live readings, others only give readings by appointment on their website, etc)?

You must practice serious scrutiny in order to avoid being taken advantage of. The social media powers that be (namely Instagram and Twitter) have decided that they are not going to help and will go as far as to remove the correct account instead of the impersonator account.

I'm going to provide an observation that I've made about scamming in general. These scammers often rely on a lack of knowledge, gullibility, and desperation. However, that's not all there is to these spiritual spaces. These aren't the traditional "oh, Microsoft is calling about my anti-virus" or whatever. It's still impersonation. But it's more awful and insidious than that.

Why? Because it weaponizes the respect you have for the person being impersonated, as well as the powerful, very human motivator that I like to call "être vu". It literally means "to be seen".

People come to spirituality in desperate states, and often have the particular desire to be seen... so much so that the first person to notice them loses natural inspection. People want to believe that this grand, important, admirable person saw them as valuable enough to be helped. To not be so alone in this great, big, overwhelming world.

Scammers take advantage of this basic human desire and make off with people's money because of it.

I know this sounds rather harsh but the truth is that, as unique as you are, everyone else is also one-of-a-kind. Most of these practitioners are by all accounts extremely busy, working people. Do you think they have time to DM you? Hold a conversation at all hours of the day and night? They don't.

They genuinely don't.

A lot of them are busy raising kids, with a whole spouse, their own physical and mental well-being to look after, their spirits to work for their benefit... they are busy with their own lives. Spiritualists have lives to attend to.

And so do you. Do everything you can to not be taken advantage of because you're worth more than some random guy's fifth check in the day.

Blessings,

From the Lemon Trees