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Comment by throwaway8879 | Hacker News Reader

This is judgement I happen to agree with. However, I would like more consistency across every other field as well. Should it be legal for someone fraudulent like Stephen Greer to take people out to the desert to have alien/UFO experiences? Or psychics providing non-free services?

I suppose health services being in a category of their own is quite sensible. Losing one's savings to a psychic doesn't have the same mortal consequences as health-coach advice that could kill you.

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I don’t disagree that fraudulent practices should be made illegal in general, but the difficulty with prosecuting the two examples you’ve given is that neither psychics or UFO fraudsters are participating in regulated industries that require licensing.

Determining what is legally fraud in these situations are typically done case-by-case, like here: https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/07/world/maria-duval-scam-crimin...

> that neither psychics or UFO fraudsters are participating in regulated industries that require licensing.

...yet?

I believe New York requires all psychics to have signage disclosing that they are purely entertainment. But frankly I don’t understand how psychics stay in business. E.g. Davis square is a pretty trendy area in Somerville outside of Boston (supposedly reddit started there). Decently popular restaurants seem to get kicked out frequently from what I imagine is just hard competition. Yet somehow this small area houses TWO psychics, neither of which seem to ever have customers going in or out. I don’t get how they pay rent, unless they’re just money laundering fronts.

They hook someone with mental health problems, usually with a trust fund or a rich spouse, and then tell them they are all caused by past lives that need to be regressed to or chakras that need to be remotely cleared. They then charge for remote chakra clearing and past life regression and it goes on for years. The retail location is just to hook the whales and then the rest takes place over the phone or Skype usually.

I live on Long Island and I see an obscene amount of Psychics' "practices" on the day to day, they're everywhere! And they've been around for a time now, I always think that theres no way they can be getting business, but it would seem that they do. A lot more people seem to buy into this nonsense than you'd think, for instance: if I go to meetup.com and restrict the search to groups that are within a 20 mile radius of me, there is not one, not two, but three entire meetup groups dedicated to "harnessing/practicing psychic ability"

A lot of businesses like that maintain a stance (often buried in disclaimers) that it's basically performance art and not a "real" service. I'm not sure how effective that is from a legal standpoint, but there's definitely some kind of strategy being employed.

this is about a case brought by the health department, whose job it is to work for the benefit of public health. UFO people and psychics might take your money but they would not at least directly harm public health so they are not a matter for the health department.

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