4/3/2023 0 Comments Zoom meeting seance meme![]() ![]() These Guerrilla Skeptics are hoping to catch Fraser on tape spewing intimate Facebook details that are totally false about the person the psychic is addressing. He has been on the circuit for years, has a book under his belt and works some Doubletree or Crowne Plaza back room every two or three days. Matthew Fraser, the target, is a young Long Island psychic who resembles Tom Cruise in the role of an oversharing altar boy. On my computer screen, we resembled the opening credits of “The Brady Bunch,” a tick-tack-toe board of men and women ranging from Daniel in New Zealand, Ruth in London, Kimon in Alabama, Robert in Maine and Michelle near Humpty Doo, Australia. ![]() The crew invited to last winter’s Skype meeting had been vetted by Gerbic to participate in a mission called “Operation Peach Pit” (and I was invited to observe). If anything, “the psychics have just gotten lazier,” a team member told me. One new source of psychic intel is Facebook, which has become a clearinghouse for the kind of insider, personal detail that psychics used to have to really sweat for. But the internet has popularized a new kind of “hot reading,” in which the psychics come to their shows prepped with specific details about various members of the audience. ]įor instance, many psychics still rely on “cold readings,” in which the psychic uses clues, like your clothes or subtle body signals, to make educated, but generally vague, guesses about your life and family. Lately, technology has changed the business of talking to the dead and created new kinds of openings for psychics to lure customers but also new ways for skeptics to flip that technology right back at them. According to one market analysis, there are nearly 95,000 psychic “businesses” in America, generating some $2 billion in revenue in 2018. These are good, extremely profitable days for the ectoplasm-related industry. Some regional favorites may sound familiar - Theresa Caputo, the Long Island medium or Chip Coffey, the “clairvoyant, clairaudient and clairsentient” psychic. ![]() Most recently, Gerbic’s members have focused on what they call “grief vampires,” that is, the kind of middlebrow psychics who profit by claiming to summon the dead in shows in venues ranging from casinos or any old Motel 6 conference suite to wine vineyards or the Queen Mary permanently anchored in Long Beach. For instance, they straightened out a lot of grim hooey about the teen-suicide myth “blue whale game,” and they have provided facts about the Burzynski Clinic, a theoretical treatment for cancer operating out of Houston. ![]() Sure, they take on the classics, like debunking “spontaneous human combustion,” but many of their other pages have real-world impact. “I ran a JCPenney portrait studio for 34 years.”Ĭollectively, the group, which has swelled to 144 members, has researched, written or revised almost 900 Wikipedia pages. “I was a baby photographer,” she explained. This usually consists of editing and monitoring Wikipedia pages - a cat-herding task she says she’s uniquely qualified for. She spends most of her days wrangling her far-flung group of Guerrilla Skeptics into common cause, defending empirical truth online. Gerbic lives in Salinas, Calif., and while she is retired from the routine world of work, she has taken on a new job, as self-appointed guardian of Enlightenment Reason. “American spellings everyone!” she commanded her half-dozen international colleagues through the Skype crackle. It all started with maintaining their Facebook sock puppets - those fake online profiles. On a group computer call last winter, Susan Gerbic was going through her checklist of tips for her team’s latest sting operation - this one focused on infiltrating the audience of a psychic. When you’re setting up fake Facebook pages, it’s the little details that can mess things up. ![]()
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