Back in the old days the psychic had to use "cold reading" techniques when scamming the suckers:
Is there anyone who knows somebody whose name starts with an "F"? I'm getting an "F". Nobody? Oh wait, it might be a "T". Does anyone know somebody with a name starting with "T"? Or maybe it's somebody who drank a lot of tea?
Eventually somebody will say something like, "
My aunty Jennifer drank tea all the time," and straightaway the psychic has got his first spectacular hit. He immediately forgets that he was looking for people with names starting with "F" or "T" and now pretends that he was looking for aunty "J"ennifer all along.
And the gullible audience play along with him:
How could he possibly know that that woman's aunty Jennifer drank a lot of tea? He couldn't just be guessing. He must be getting the information supernaturally.
But that was the old days. These days there is no guesswork required.
Just recently, for example, a con artist named Shawn Bolz was booked to speak at the Asuza Now Conference in Los Angeles. He claims that god speaks to him and gives him personal information about people he has never met. Then he repeats that information to the audience and they go fucking ape shit! They shout and cheer and jump and down and wave their arms in the air and assume that they have just witnessed a miracle. Shawn Bolz looks on approvingly while thinking to himself,
these must be some of the dumbest people on the planet.
What Bolz does is quite simple. He is going to speak at the Asuza Now Conference so he starts searching Facebook and Twitter looking for people who have mentioned the Asuza Now Conference - and specifically people who say they will be attending the conference. Then he bookmarks their Facebook and Twitter pages and that's all the hard work done.
During his research Bolz discovered that a couple named Kenny & Patricia had told all their Facebook friends they would be attending the Conference, so he downloaded their Facebook and Twitter pages onto his cell phone.
Then on Conference day he struts out onto the stage with his cell phone and starts reading back the information he had previously downloaded.
You can see the scam in action in the video below - and if you can't see the scam; if you think Bolz really is getting his information from god, then you may well be as gullible as Kenny and Patricia. Who knows, you may be Bolz's next victim.
Bolz came a gutser with the next couple however - they were at the conference alright, but it was so boring that they went outside for breather - and that's when Bolz called their names. Eventually he had to ask friends of the couple to go outside and bring them back in again so the scam could proceed.
Now if God was really on the other end of the telephone he would have told Bolz to skip that couple and move onto the next victim - but God wasn't on the other end was he? All Bolz had was a downloaded FaceBook page and it certainly didn't tell him, "
We've just gone outside for a piss. Back in five minutes."
