There are over 750 Gypsy Fortune Tellers in the police database. Is your Gypsy Psychic on the list? My Story:   page 1   page 2   page 3    return to Gypsy Psychic Scams homepage Exposing the Truth: Frequently Asked Questions My Story (continued from page 1) Right at the same time the ex was leaving the picture, my family went through some really bad times, very very difficult times I won't get into. The important point I want to make here is that if things hadn't been bad before for me getting taken advantage of by Gypsy con artists, they were about to get a lot worse. When I explained what was going on to Helen, she told me that this was a huge thing, a huge evil she had to remove from my family once and for all. But in order to do this, in order to truly do this, once and for all, she would need the sum of $15,000. I remember her big longwinded speech to me on the sofa in her living room there on 87th and Ridgeland. The speech was the build up to why this "great sacrifice" was necessary. (I remember how every time in the past she was about to hit me up for more money, it was preceded by one of Helen's big motivational speeches -- after I'd been through a few of these, I could tell when they were coming on, and I felt like asking, "Okay, how much this time?") I was in shock. I felt cold, and numb. I felt like I was being asked to throw away all of my judgment. How in the world will I get that kind of money? I had just finished school in the Spring, and I had well over $10,000 in credit card debt, NOT counting the interest, as it was from the other "sacrifices" I'd made to Helen for the work. Work that I had been promised would be the final and only sacrifice necessary. So what was this now? Helen did everything to convince me that this $15,000, would really be it this time. No more sacrifice would be needed. This would be the sacrifice of sacrifices, once and for all. Helen has a sister, also a Gypsy fortune teller/ "spiritualist" named Faye, from Baltimore. Faye was in for some very special work, and came in to help Helen with my important case. Helen had me come over and meet Faye at Helen's house in Oak Lawn. Helen was away for a few days preparing, and Faye and her husband were watching the house. I was given specific instructions to say, "In honor of Madame Clara, and Sister Paige" when I meet Faye at the door, and that had to be the very first thing I said when she greeted me, absolutely no exception. (more weird rituals designed to control your belief in the Gypsy psychic) I did so and Faye smiled, gave me a big hug and said how happy she was to finally meet me because she said that she actually knew me spiritually because she had worked on my case, helping her sister, for a long time. So it was an honor, she said, to finally get to meet me. I was told by Faye that by trusting Helen to do this work, to give her the $15,000, that she would totally take care of all of this darkness surrounding my family once and for all, and that Helen's own powers to help people would grow as a result. Faye acted so positive, so caring, like she genuninely felt like she was my sister. She even indicated as such. It was hard for my better judgment to suspect her at all, she was so convincing of her caring for me. Faye told me that things would be all fixed with my ex. I told her I didn't care about my ex and don't worry about it. But Faye said no, you do, and don't worry (this again was another sign that I was being told what they thought I wanted to hear -- I knew darn well by that point that the ex was totally no good and I was getting over it all on my own). Faye gave me a speech telling me how much Helen cared about helping me and how the work she had done had really been doing its job and that she's really good at spiritual work and helping people be rescued and healed from darkness. But back to the $15,000. That kind of incredible sum of money meant I had a major financial sacrifice to make. Helen put a lot of pressure on me, telling me what the consequences would be for each member of my family, throughout our lifetimes, if I didn't do what was necessary to stamp out this evil. She seemed rushed to begin and to get the money. And the money all had to come at once in the full amount. She even said there was great evil lurking around me trying to convince me not to do it, to fool me and sway me. Helen even said one day through all this that she saw a demon outside, in human form, but it wasn't a human, it was a demon. She was all animated when she told me this at her house. She asked me all excitedly if I had seen the demon, telling me that I must have, right? I sat there trying to think back through that day and all of the strangers I had passed walking from the train station downtown to my job. No one face stood out, nothing that I could think of. Helen put on her bullying/pressuring voice, "Come on! You must have seen him." I asked her to describe what the demon's human appearance looked like, but Helen refused and said she can't talk about it, it was too evil. Which also meant that I'd have no way to question it if I didn't see anyone fitting her description. How convenient for her. Well, Helen had done it. She had me adequately scared for the well being of my whole family. What choice did I have? If a psychic spiritualist who supposedly has proven her gifts and ability tells me I'm doomed if I don't give her this money to rid me and my family of this once and for all, what else could I do? I went to the bank, very frustrated and feeling weird, and proceeded to take out cash advances on all of my credit cards, maxing each out til I reached the grand total of $15,000 in cash, which Helen took from me for her work. Now, with well over $25,000 and change in debt, again not counting the interest payments on that debt (which are really steep when it's a cash advance), plus not enough income from my job to pay this debt off quickly at all, I was a financial ship taking on water in interest fees. Time rolled on. I listened to Helen's instructions and tried to be 100% obedient. I became more isolated. All of the real issues I really needed to talk to a good counselor about were trapped inside because I was not allowed to tell anyone what was going on -- it would ruin the work as I was always warned, in which case all would be lost, including the enormous sums of money I'd sacrificed. This really messed up what friendships I could have because it just isolated me more from friends, family and anyone other than the Gypsies. And Helen wasn't exactly a friend ready to go hang out with. Half of the time, when I would call looking for some reassurance, I was told to call back in a week. A week? What was I supposed to do in the meantime? By 1996, I was getting really depressed and lonely. Helen had told me back in the summer of '94 that the love of my life was either the ex or this other girl I had gone to college with that I was always attracted to but had never dated. Helen said she couldn't tell me which girl it was, but I was to trust in her work so I had to just leave it alone. Sometimes, Helen would tell me that I was psychic as well and would develop my gifts, only not as powerful as hers. Well, the ex was out of the picture, so that left bachelorette #2 as the winner, right? Well, bachelorette #2 got engaged that summer, and I felt that Helen had about $30,000+ dollars worth of explaining to do. I wasn't feeling any better. My family was basically about the same, only more depressed after the things that had happened the previous fall, the supposed love of my life was marrrying another guy. Helen had an explanation for this -- she said sometimes there's this thing where someone meets someone just like the person they're supposed to meet and falls for that other person first. That's what happened here. It was a shame, but it's an energy thing. That didn't exactly comfort me and I was angry. Helen did say though to just leave it alone for now and that she felt this girl really liked me and she would work on it. How the heck is this spiritualist going to cause an engagement to break up? This was getting weirder and weirder, but every challenge I threw out was answered back with a warning to let her handle it. I also started noticing that Helen was getting harder and harder to get a hold of, and wouldn't give me the opportunities to come over once a week like she had in the past. That summer I moved into an apartment in the city. I moved there thinking this would be good for me, but it only isolated me further since I still was ordered to keep all of this spiritual work a secret. My job had gotten really bad and I needed a new one. Helen was telling me that darkness was using my bosses to try to destroy my self esteem and that I needed to confront them, which I did. I felt really stupid following Helen's advice. I felt like had I never gotten involved with these Gypsies, I would have handled this better. My intuition, which Helen had been quashing for 4 years now, was gnawing at me. I finally left the job and got another one. The embarrassing part was that my friends at the job I left saw me acting strangely. I knew that, but hey I had to just ignore it because of this all important spiritual work, right? I so blindly trusted Helen and tried to do my best at every turn to obey her orders, regardless of how strange it might make me appear to the rest of the world. This was so painful because I knew other people would just see me as strange. They couldn't be allowed to know what was going on. I was too afraid, I was made to be too afraid, of dark energies and spirits seemingly bent on destroying me, according to Helen. I started a new job in the beginning of '97. Helen was getting harder to get hold of. Finally, around Easter, I visited her house. It was weird because this time I had this premonition (don't worry, not psychic). I had this weird feeling of what it would be like not to be in that house visiting with her anymore like I'd been doing for 4 years now. Then, within weeks, something big happened. To this day I don't know what it was, but the story I was given by Helen is that her husband, Rick Cannon, had become totally possessed by evil spirits and had a nervous breakdown because of it. Rick was totally possessed, Helen told me. I thought to myself, "How can this supposedly gifted, strong spiritualist not protect her own husband if there's supposedly a veil of protection around their house and she's supposedly growing in strength?" Helen said she was in trouble and needed my help. Rick, in his possessed state, had kicked Helen and her two oldest sons, Frank and Mitch, out of the house. Rick's family, who Helen said were evil, had taken over her house and poisoned Rick's mind. This was turning into a nightmare for me at this point. I'm even further in debt now from Helen nibbling for money here and there, and I'm watching Helen, the woman who'd made herself my "rock", the woman I'd been told to trust with all my being, running around in a panic. Helen said that she needed my help driving her around to a few places. Rick still had her youngest son in the house with him and Helen wanted that son. But she said that Rick would call the police on her if he knew where she was or that his family would come after her (for what? I thought). So I had to pick Helen up from a hotel she was staying at on 159th St. in Tinley Park, and drive her to the bank in the parking lot of Chicago Ridge Mall next to Bennigan's, so she could see if she could access jewels and money in a safe deposit box she had. All the time I was driving Helen around Oak Lawn and Chicago Ridge, she was crouched way down low in my back seat with a jacket draped over her so no one would see her. This was getting way too creepy for me. At one point, Helen even asked me to go to the house to pick up her youngest son because he knew me so he'd go with me. As much as Helen had tremendous influence over me with the brainwashing up to this point, I was not about to put myself in a situation where I could be in trouble with police for being an accomplice to something I had no idea about. Helen was disappointed with me when I told her I was just too afraid to go over and pick up Geno, her youngest son, on my own like that. When I told her this, she acted like I had abandoned her, like I was so unappreciative for all of the work she had done for me. But I told her she needed to talk to the police if this was going on. She took her two sons and stayed at a shelter for battered women, but I don't know that for sure, because she told me she couldn't tell me where she was staying for her own protection, and that I'd have to wait to hear from her next. That took about a good two months. In the meantime, more bad things were happening. About a few weeks later, I started getting really restless and agitated, just walking around really restless and angry. It was getting so I couldn't concentrate. Maybe what was going on was that my real feelings about everything was finally getting the chance to surface. I don't really know, but with all of my Gypsy conditioning, I thought it must be from Helen's problems, like some kind of spiritual energy link that was now affecting me greatly. I had to talk to someone desperately. But part of my warnings never to tell anyone about the spiritual work also included never talking to another spiritualist. Yet I had to do something. I was feeling awful. Then an idea hit me. A few weeks before all of the problems with Helen, there were signs something was brewing. Helen needed to go see another Gypsy woman, on older woman with a house at 119th and Western that's no longer there. This woman, Laura, was another fortune teller/spiritualist, and Helen's aunt. I had to give Helen a ride to Laura's house and wait in front while they discussed something. Well, I decided to track down this Laura. I found her in the phone book and went to consult with her. She seemed less interested in really listening to what I had to say than to explain to me that Helen was in a weak state and that her powers were low and she could not help me. In fact, Laura said that Helen was never really strong enough to help my specific bad luck but that Helen had really wanted to and would like to think that she could have. Laura, on the other hand, said that she was a lot stronger than Helen and could help me. And that it would be $5,000. "$5,000?" I thought. "But, wait. I'm sorry. All of the sacrifice I've made so far, doesn't that count for anything?" I really felt that I shouldn't have to "space", as Helen would say, any more money out because it was still the same me, and still the same "case" to pray on. Wasn't it the same me and the same God who I was showing my faith to? Why the new sacrifice? That didn't make sense to me if this money were really only meant to be a sign to God, and not used or enjoyed for personal reasons in any way by Saundra, Helen or any other Gypsy psychic as both Saundra and Helen had assured me. But Laura stood her ground. It was like whatever I pleaded with her went in one ear and out the other. I felt stuck. I didn't know what to do or where else to turn. Helen's warnings about what would happen to me if I told someone made me too scared to talk to a counselor or even go to another Gypsy outside of her family. I trusted Laura thinking if it's her aunt, it's still okay. I didn't feel like I had any other choice after Helen's orders. So I gave in and took out another $5,000 cash advance. Now I was really depressed. Laura said she would do special prayers, yada yada yada. She would have me over to her house on Western and pray over my head. Nothing she did worked at all. I never felt even the slightest bit better, only worse. And she wasn't exactly reassuring. Finally, towards the end of the summer, Helen contact me again, all in a better mood. She was staying in the city and doing her spiritual work she said out of a friend's fortune telling storefront on Armitage and Clark in Lincoln Park. She had me visit it a couple of times. I didn't want to tell her about Laura. I was afraid to. I also noticed something interesting in that a picture Helen always had on her wall in her living room, supposedly of her parents, ended up on the wall of Laura's house that summer. I needed to talk to someone Helen worked with but it couldn't be Helen. So Helen put me in touch with a Gypsy psychic who went be the name Miss Stevens. Her first named she used was Ashley but she told me her real name was Inez. She worked out of her house up in Mundelein at this time (1997-98). I confided in Ashley what had happened with Laura. Ashley told Helen for me. Helen eventually talked to me about it. I was really scared to confront her. With all of this evil and darkness and curses and everything else they had scared me with, I was too afraid not to follow their orders, and I could only imagine what I'd face now that Helen knew I had told another person about our work. Helen did lecture me but she said she was more disappointed with me. She also said that I singlehandedly nearly destroyed all of her own spiritual powers. I felt horrible. She said that she had to do all kind of special work to regain them after this. Also, she said that her aunt was now cast out from her Church and that her aunt had been working with darkness, not good. Wanting to regain my "trust" in Helen, at some point I asked her about the money she still owed for the credit card charges on the Florida trip. Helen immediately and angrily dismissed it saying that all that money was used to help her regain her powers after what I'd done, so forget about it. 1998 arrived and I would talk to Helen periodically, but I told her I felt more comfortable talking to Ashley right now. Ashley said she would do the work for now. But once again the ATM machine was ordered to open. Ashley began demanding money for her special work she needed to do. And once again I was forced take out cash advances, for about another $4,000. Ashley's work wasn't helping. I was frustrated not making friends. Her advice in this matter wasn't helping, nor did she have any groundbreaking words of wisdom to really get to the root of my problems. That fall, I moved in with a friend who needed a roommate. Some things started picking up a little for me, things that I had made happen for myself, but then I ran right into another bad romantic relationship and a huge heartbreak. The worst of it culminated on a business trip in the beginning of '99. I was alone in a hotel room, feeling terrible and anxious (just like those original feelings back in 1992 when I first went to see Saundra). I realized right then and there, once more, that nothing had ever really changed. I called Helen, desperate. Only this time the voice that used to tell me she'd take care of everything and to have faith was replaced with a voice that said the bad energy around me was overpowering and that unfortunately Helen just wasn't strong enough to handle it, nor might it be possible for it to be handled. This scared the hell out of me. I had been systematically conditioned for 7 years now to believe in dark energy and evil spirits and that all of my financial sacrifice to these Gypsy fortune tellers was to protect me and heal me from this, and now Helen was basically abandoning me? I was frantic. I refused to let Helen off that easily. I told her no way. She had to help me. She told me to call her back in a little while. I called her back and she said that she would need $2000 as soon as I got back into Chicago and how fast could I get the money? I'm in a hotel room in a strange city, alone. This Gypsy who'd been gaining my confidence promising services and work for healing and protection for 6 years now and who between her and her relative and friend had taken nearly 40,000, plus all of the high interest rates on it for the previous 4 years, now was telling me there was nothing she could do to heal me from the curse that she had convinced me I had and had convinced me that she and she alone was meant by God to heal me from. And now she said she had to have $2000 or else she couldn't help me, period? Well guess what? On that day, my credit cards were completely maxed out from all of the other "sacrifices" towards the work. And I no longer had the credit rating to qualify for any more credit because my debt to income ratio was so high and my maxed out balances so steep. Where now was the God that needed me to show him this sacrifice by handing these enormous sums of cash over to these "spiritualists" who had instructed me to do so in His name? I arrived home a nervous wreck, and at a lowest of lows I never thought humanly possible. The next two months it was a victory for me to make it through one day, the anguish was so intense. I talked to Helen a few times. She had me over once. I begged her to help me but not for this $2,000. I told her, "Come on! How well do you know me? What about all of the other work?" She was different, more distant. She didn't seem to recognize or care about it. I felt like she really didn't want me around. I'd been conditioned to believe I was living under a curse. I'd been conditioned and led to believe that there are gifted Gypsy psychics out there whose lives are dedicated to God and to helping people. Gypsy women who do not take even a cent of the sacrifices made by their clients for the work done to heal them. I'd been told not to tell a soul about any of this. And because of what I was led to believe, I felt I had no other choice but to try to find, one last time, a Gypsy psychic who could help me. If I were to believe what Saundra, Helen and the rest had told me was true, what else could I really do? I picked up the phone book, thinking I'd already seen the listing for all of the Gypsy fortune tellers in the South Suburbs. But then I found one more. I called her up. It was a Saturday. She could hear the sadness, the desperation, in my voice. I didn't want to make this call. I didn't want to go through all of this again. But what else was there? I had to hold out hope. I met her and sat at her dining room table. Her house was different from the other Gypsies. No tacky, glaring neon sign in the front window. No signs at all, actually. And she was older than the others. She was like a caring, warm grandma. She gave me a reading. Everything checked out. She said I'd really hurt by someone, a girl. But that this girl does care for me. That checked out too. She said a few other things that seemed to check out. She said that I was good at making money, but that I was easy come, easy go with it. That also checked out when I thought about all of the sacrifices! She said she needed to look into what was really going on. She'd need a special candle. This all sounded like the usual drill from before, right? But rather than seeing the consistency of that compared with the way things had been done when first meeting Saundra and Helen, and questioning whether this consistent pattern meant this was all a scam, I instead thought I was supposed to see it as validation that there really is something to all of this spiritualist work, and that maybe it was just some of the Gypsies like Saundra and Helen were crooks, but not all (because of that psychic ability, etc.). Like maybe because of their unique cultural backgrounds, they have trouble managing their lives in light of their psychic gifts and spiritual powers. I gave her the money for the special meditation she had to undergo. She had me call her back the next day. When I met her I told her all of the bad things that had happened with Helen and Saundra. She said she's older and much more experienced, and that her powers are way way stronger. She also said, and she would repeat this often later, that seeing is believing. "Wow," I thought. "A spiritualist who guarantees her work". And boy was she also confident in herself. She was so relaxed, not giving big speeches about her abilities like Helen, and she didn't raise her voice like Helen and the rest. She had me come back two days later. We met at the dining room table again. She explained how she would get me reunited with the girl who had hurt me and that would all be fine. She needed several hundred dollars to do this work with. She also said that yes I was cursed, or my family at least. but she would take care of that. "Don't worry!" she said, with a big, caring smile on her face and confidence that seemed unshakable. Some weeks went on and I was anxious to get back with this girl. The Gypsy "spiritualist" didn't have any solutions yet, but she said she had to look into things further. It was then that she sat me down and explained to me what she had to do and how what she had to deal with was much more involved that it had first been shown to her by the spirits. She would need to do some very special work, and that the number 9 was significant. Again, at this point, you've got to be saying, "How could you not see the scam? It's like the first Gypsy's angle all over again, with a different number." You have to understand how much brainwashing Gypsies do to you, how much effort they make to keep you under their control for this to make sense. But, despite the control I was still under, that thought about the "number" being proof of a scam crossed my mind and I told her how skeptical I was. That I was at rock bottom and how my faith in all of this was not exactly at an all time high right about now. This time at least I wasn't going to worry about offending anybody. If I had a problem with this, I was going to voice it. I did. rest of story on page 3