Here’s an uncomfortable truth: almost nobody in the cases below was unusually gullible. They were frightened, grieving, or desperate for someone they loved to get well — and that is exactly the moment exploitation waits for.
I’ve spent the last few weeks reading cases of occult exploitation: a professor and a principal in Andhra Pradesh who killed their own daughters in a ritual, and fifty-three members of the Order of the Solar Temple who died in ritual “transits” across Europe decades earlier. This isn’t unique to one country, one decade, or one belief system. And it left me with a harder question than “who’s responsible” — how would you actually know, in the moment, if it was happening to you?
That’s what this piece is for. Not reassurance, not theory — a checklist you can run on anyone currently asking for your trust, your money, or your faith while your health, your grief, or your fear is on the line. I’ll give you the exact test I hold myself to, so you can use it before you finish reading.
The Shape of Exploitation
Once you lay the cases side by side — not just the Indian ones, but the ones from wealthier countries too — a pattern emerges that has nothing to do with religion, region, or education level.
In Pune, a software engineer and his wife spent years searching for a cure — one daughter had a neurological disorder, the other an autoimmune condition that modern medicine wasn’t resolving. A self-styled godwoman convinced them that a godman who had died decades earlier now resided in her disciple’s body, and that if they surrendered everything they owned, their daughters would recover. Over six years, they handed over close to ₹14 crore — a home in the UK, a farmhouse, their savings — before realising their daughters had shown no improvement at all.
In Ahmedabad, a widow who had just lost her husband and son within the same year was told, by two people posing as a “black magic baba” and a “tantrik guru mata,” that both deaths were caused by tantric forces — and that only continued payment could stop the same fate from reaching her. She sent over ₹14 lakh, through couriers and bank transfers, before the demands escalated to money for a “human sacrifice” — the point at which she finally recognised a threat, not a cure, and went to the police.
And this is not an India story, or a “developing world superstition” story, however comforting that framing might be. In Australia, a mother-daughter pair were arrested for allegedly running a fraud and money-laundering syndicate now reported at around $200 million, presenting themselves as psychics who could sense danger and lift spiritual threats from their clients’ lives — one of the largest fraud cases in that country’s history. In the Washington, D.C. area, a woman calling herself a psychic convinced another woman she was cursed, who in turn manipulated a Maryland man into believing he owed a debt to “mobsters” — the pressure eventually drove him to embezzle more than $4 million from his own employer. In Texas, a couple built a scheme worth more than $2.5 million around “curse cleansing,” deliberately targeting people freshly grieving a death or a divorce, telling them their heartbreak was supernatural, and that only an escalating series of paid rituals — gold coins mailed to an altar, accounts liquidated — could lift it. Decades earlier, in Switzerland, France, and Quebec, fifty-three members of the Order of the Solar Temple died in ritual “transits,” and researchers who studied the group have been careful to note that many of them were educated, middle-aged professionals with stable lives, not desperate or gullible people by any obvious measure.
Different countries. Different decades. Different vocabulary — dosh, curse, spiritual threat, karmic debt. Structurally, it is the same machine every time:
- Someone in genuine distress — a sick child, a grieving parent, a recent loss, a run of bad luck — is told the cause is supernatural.
- Only the “healer” can diagnose it, and the diagnosis conveniently requires their continued involvement.
- The price escalates as new “problems” are discovered, never fixed by the last payment.
- Leaving becomes dangerous — the curse will worsen, the daughters won’t heal, the debt to the cosmos will come due — so people stay far longer than they would if leaving were simply free.
- Other help is discouraged or displaced — doctors, family, or plain scepticism are framed as obstacles to the “real” solution.
None of this requires poverty. None of it requires a lack of education. It requires only a moment when someone is frightened enough, or hopeful enough, to stop asking questions — and someone else willing to make sure that moment never ends. If you want to sit with how ordinary, intelligent people end up inside structures like this — not just in spiritual settings but in wellness culture generally — Amanda Montell’s Cultish is one of the more useful books I’ve read on the subject; it’s less about “gullibility” and more about language, and how it’s used to make leaving feel unthinkable.
The Checklist: How to Tell If You’re Being Spiritually Defrauded
I don’t want any of this to stay theoretical, so here is the checklist itself — built from every case above. If you are currently seeing a healer, an astrologer, a tantric, a “guru,” or anyone offering you spiritual solutions, run your own situation through it. Not mine. Yours.
Ask yourself, honestly:
- Did someone tell you a problem your doctor, lawyer, or bank was already handling is actually spiritual — and that you should quietly stop following their advice?
- Did the first ritual or remedy get swapped for a bigger, costlier one before you even saw if the first one worked?
- Were you told that stopping, leaving, or getting a second opinion will make things worse — that a curse will grow, a debt will come due, or someone you love won’t recover if you walk away?
- Were you told to keep this a secret — from your spouse, your family, your bank, or your doctor?
- Could you describe your last payment to a police officer or bank manager, in plain words, without feeling embarrassed or afraid of what happens if you stop?
If even one of those has a “yes,” pause before you pay anything further. Not because spirituality is fake — because exploitation and genuine practice diverge exactly at these five points, and you don’t need to understand energy work, ritual, or theology to see the difference. You only need to notice whether the structure around you is tightening.
If you’re not sure, the fastest check is boring and it works: tell one person outside the relationship — family, a friend, your doctor — exactly what you’ve been asked to do, and why. Every case above survived on isolation. Very few survive daylight.
I hold myself to this same test, in public, below.
Running This Checklist on My Own Practice
I don’t think I get to answer for my own practice with a feeling. I think I have to answer it with structure, the same way I just laid out theirs.
Can someone stop, at any point, without consequence? For my Reiki healing sessions, the energy exchange is decided by the person receiving it — when they want to give, and how much. Nobody is charged more because their situation turns out to be “worse” than expected. For teaching — Reiki, Kumalak, Feng Shui, Crystal Healing — the course fee is fixed and known before anyone enrols. After that, whether someone continues practising, comes back for the next level, or simply stops, is entirely theirs to decide. Nothing bad happens to someone for walking away. That, on its own, rules out almost everything that made the cases above so damaging.
There’s one honest complication I want to name here, because leaving it out would be its own kind of dishonesty. In the Reiki I teach, each level carries a responsibility, not a consequence. Learn Reiki 1, and the responsibility is to your own self-healing. Learn Reiki 2, and the responsibility extends to healing others, when they ask. Learn Reiki 3A, and the responsibility is to keep working at lighting your own inner light. Learn Reiki 3B, and the responsibility is to show the light to othrers. I tell every student this, and I mean it — one shouldn’t turn away from that responsibility once it’s been given.
But notice what kind of statement that is. It’s an appeal to conscience, not a threat. Nobody is told their health will suffer if they stop practising, that karma will come collect, or that their certificate expires unless they keep showing up. A responsibility is something you choose to keep honouring, or don’t. If someone puts Reiki down for a year, or forever, nothing happens to them — no curse activates, no fee changes, no door closes if they come back. I can ask someone to carry a weight honestly. I can’t ever let that weight become leverage. That’s the distinction the cases above never made, and it’s the one I hold myself to.
Does the price ever grow after the fact? No. The core service has a set cost. Anything beyond it is offered voluntarily, at the person’s own discretion — and timing doesn’t matter either. Some clients keep a small pouch or a red packet at home, a “bookni,” adding to it over weeks or months as their means allow, and hand it to me whenever they’re ready. For energy work like Reiki, that’s entirely fine — what matters is that the exchange happens. It’s important that they give; the universe returns it to me in one form or another regardless. Shamanism works differently, and I tell every client this upfront: the spirits are invoked fresh for each ritual, so an offering is due each time, not stored up and given later.
What do I actually promise? This is the question I’ve had to sit with the longest, because my honest answer — “whatever is for someone’s highest good” — is true, but it’s also exactly the kind of soft, unfalsifiable language a con artist hides behind when they don’t want to be pinned to an outcome. So let me be more precise, in the way I owe you to be precise:
I don’t promise a cure. I don’t promise your money will multiply, or that a specific danger will lift by a specific date. Reiki supports whatever your body and mind are able to integrate — nothing more, nothing certain. Kumalak, in my experience, is remarkably good at surfacing a likely root cause of a problem and pointing toward a direction — it is not a guarantee, and I say so. Tarot offers a perspective to think with, not a prophecy to obey.
If a practice doesn’t work for someone, I don’t tell them they’re cursed, that they didn’t believe hard enough, or that they need to pay more to fix what didn’t happen. That sentence — the one no exploiter I’ve ever read about has been willing to say — is closer to the real proof than anything else I can offer you.
Do I ever stand between someone and other help? No. Never. If someone comes to me with a health concern, I ask if they’ve seen a doctor, and if they haven’t, that’s the first thing I tell them to do — before anything else. If someone lives somewhere without easy access to me, I will point them toward a Reiki practitioner near them rather than insist they wait for me. In Pune, the family kept believing instead of continuing to pursue medical care for their daughters, and that choice — encouraged by the people they trusted — is where the real damage was done. I refuse to ever be that voice in someone’s ear.
Would this survive a stranger watching the actual transaction? Honestly — I don’t know for certain, because I’ve never tested it that way. But I think back to something that happened a few years ago. I was walking home one evening when I saw a nurse who lived nearby — we’d nod at each other, the ordinary courtesies of neighbours. That evening she wasn’t nodding at anything. She was rigid with fear, a baby in her arms, moving fast toward the road to flag a ride to the hospital. The child had a very high fever.
I didn’t ask if she believed in energy healing. I asked what was wrong, and when I understood, I asked if I could carry the baby for a moment so I could let some Reiki energy flow while she got her bearings and got us moving. She said yes. We went together. At the hospital, as she got down, she pressed ₹10 into my hand — not because I’d asked, not because anything was owed, just because she wanted to give something back. There was no fee agreed beforehand. There was no claim that anything was cured. There was a frightened mother, a baby held for a few minutes on the way, and ₹10 given afterward because something about that moment moved her. I still remember that ₹10 more than I remember most fees I’ve ever been paid — but honestly, even that wasn’t the real exchange. The real exchange was a feverish baby’s hand closing around mine, tight, unthinking, the way only a child in distress holds onto anything that feels steady. And I think a stranger watching would have seen exactly that: nothing owed, nothing promised, help offered anyway.
What I Actually Want You to Take From This
I’m not writing this to convince you that spirituality is safe. It isn’t, automatically. It is only ever as safe as the structure around it — whether leaving costs you something, whether the price can grow, whether the person guiding you will ever stand between you and a doctor, and whether they’re honest about the limits of what they can promise.
My own Guru, A K Pathik, has repeated one rule to me more than any technique he’s ever taught: this path is for healing, never for harming — not others, not yourself. That’s a personal ethic, and you can’t verify it from the outside. What you can verify is the structure: does the price move? Can you leave? Does it ever ask you to choose it over a doctor? Those questions will tell you more about any healer than a claim of lineage ever could.
Bring your scepticism into every spiritual relationship you’re in. A real practice welcomes it. It’s the fake ones that need you to stop asking.
I don’t know what’s for someone’s highest good. I know what isn’t — a price that grows with someone’s fear, or a healer who stands between them and a doctor.
If you take one thing from this piece, let it be the checklist, not my answers to it. Bookmark those five questions above. Run them on anyone offering you spiritual guidance — a healer, an astrologer, a guru, me — because that checklist will outlast any single practitioner, including the one writing this.
Energyia teaches Reiki, Feng Shui, Crystal Healing, Lama Fera, Tarot, Numerology and does divination using Kumalak at The Learning Sanctuary, iMusingz. Free classes and live demonstrations are available on our YouTube channel before you commit to anything. Explore courses at imusingz.com.
This post references real, reported criminal and fraud cases from India, Australia, and the United States. Some sentences in this post contain Amazon affiliate links. If you choose to purchase through them, iMusingz may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. Recommendations are made only where they genuinely support the content of the post.