AMID THE FLOOD of emails that were landing in our special-investigations inbox every day was a brief message from a French “astropsychologist” who called himself Dr. Turi.
“Do not throw the baby with the water!”
We initially overlooked this message, confused about what this person was trying to tell us. But then we noticed a blog post Dr. Turi had written. The rambling missive began with an apocalyptic GIF of fiery clouds and a quote warning his readers that the universe is “under no obligation to make any SPIRITUAL sense to anyone.”
In the post, he blasted our story as an attack on the entire spiritual and psychic world, calling us innocent “kids” who knew little of “the mysterious world they live in.” Then he went on to tell a personal story about his own experience with psychic mailings, in which he described an arrangement similar to the one Antoine had told us about Maria. We were hesitant to enter into a battle of words with this man, but our curiosity got the best of us. So we sent him an email asking if he would speak with us.
Thank you for taking some of your precious time to answer my email. Be sure my world wide reading audience will enjoy this “debate” fully were [sic] I will offer solid proofs of my cosmic gift!
We immediately began to regret our decision when we were subsequently bombarded with emails from his followers telling us about aliens, government cover-ups, the alignment of the moon and the stars, and how Dr. Turi had used his gift to change their lives. Apparently he had spread our email address far and wide, urging his supporters to get in touch. We called him anyway.
When he didn’t answer his phone, we left a voice mail. Then we received an email from his wife, Mrs. Turi, who seemed skeptical of our motives and protective of her husband. Eventually we were able to get on the phone with both of them, and the phone call was one of the weirdest we had ever experienced. Dr. Turi and his wife often spoke over each other, at some points bickering dramatically. He patronizingly shushed her on multiple occasions, talked in circles, and was difficult to follow.
He told us he had became trapped in a terrible business deal after signing a contract with a Canadian marketing company just a few years earlier. He said the company had called and asked him if he wanted to sign a contract that would allow it to use his “name and worldwide reputation” to promote its business. The company flew him and his wife to Toronto, put them up in a fancy hotel, wined and dined them, showed them around the office and shipment facility, and gave them a tour of the city. The trip ended with a meeting in the president’s office, where Dr. Turi signed a contract.
He also explained much of this in multiple posts on his website, writing, for instance:
I was certain my astrological expertise would serve a real solid purpose and as always, my unarguable, well-documented, dated predictions would be recognized as legitimate.
After a few weeks, I received the sample to what was going to be mailed to hundreds of thousands people all over the world from Canada! To our dismay, NOTHING of what I sent them was used! Instead my solid daily guidance and predictions forecasts were turned into the very same type of deceptive Neptunian gibberish found in the CNN article [a reference to the Maria Duval letters he’d learned about from our article]. [The letters] used my name and my picture into a very famous psychic promising to find love, to win the lottery, to find lost pets and a myriad of nonsense that infuriated me for months to come.
This all sounded very similar to what we had heard about Maria. Dr. Turi thought he would be able to offer some sort of valid service via the mail since he’d willingly signed a contract. Just like Maria, he claimed not to have realized what he was getting himself into.
On top of this, he told us that he received only a few hundred dollars in royalties. He told us he got out of the contract as soon as he could, but the damage was done: many of the ardent followers he’d attracted over his years of work thought he was a scammer.
“I’ve been conned,” he told us.
• • •
We still didn’t know what to think of Dr. Turi, but we began to see how someone could end up at the center of a scam beyond his or her control. His story also gave us a window into the booming business of mail-order psychics, indicating once again that sometimes all it takes for a shady company to profit is a compelling face and name. It made us think of Patrick, the psychic whose letter we’d found all those months ago in the pile of junk mail. It seemed that, like Maria and Dr. Turi, he too was also a living person.
During our research into the businessmen involved with Maria, we’d come across a number of other psychics with their own supposed talents, personalities, and backstories. They all followed a strikingly similar pattern, and some of their websites and letters were almost identical. There was the elderly clairvoyant named Laetizia, who claimed to come from a long line of psychics on her family’s small Mediterranean island. A young woman wearing a brightly colored sari named Alisha boasted that she’d helped thousands of people solve their problems. And a blue-eyed girl named Rinalda said she’d received her psychic gift after falling into a coma from a terrible bout of appendicitis.
All three of these supposed psychics had websites that claimed they could help people win money or find love, just as the letters from Maria and Patrick did, and as those from Dr. Turi apparently did as well. The websites also happened to trace back to our Swiss friend with the Sparks mailboxes, Martin Dettling. While we could find the stray complaint online about these three female psychics, for the most part they seemed to have gained little traction compared with the massive success and notoriety of the Maria Duval letters.
We also discovered a young, handsome Swiss man who lived a secret life in Panama. With long, highlighted hair and earrings, Martin Zoller claimed on his website that he’d risen to international fame after using his psychic skills to find a missing plane in the jungles of Bolivia. Martin’s website was flashy and highly produced, and it appeared he had followers on social media who attended various events he hosted. He offered psychic guidance for a fee—but unlike Maria, his messages were sent by email, and he had never been publicly accused of any sort of wrongdoing. And again, one of the companies behind his psychic empire had its own Maria Duval connections. It was managed by a Swiss businessman tied to the scheme, and we soon found evidence that its main shareholder had made a donation to a nonprofit as a wedding gift for Jean-Claude Reuille, our pen pal living in Thailand.
The most interesting of the psychic bunch was a woman named Anne Chamfort—another supposedly “world-famous” French clairvoyant. We first heard her name from our Astroforce whistleblower source, who said that she had been one of three psychic personas used by Jacques Mailland in the early years. Her name also appeared alongside Maria’s in online complaints from many years ago, but it seemed that her name had gone dormant as Maria became the star.
When our stories about the Maria letters hit the internet, an anonymous source contacted us with some interesting information. She said she worked for a direct marketing company headquartered in Moscow that was currently sending out letters and psychic readings signed by Anne Chamfort. The source said it was clear that the Anne Chamfort letters were modeled directly after Maria’s and that they were currently being sent out in the Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia, South Africa, and Russia. “Anne Chamfort’s letters are just copy-paste versions of Duval’s letters,” she told us. “Take out Duval’s photos and stick in Chamfort’s.”
Interestingly, the Russian company listed on domain registrations for AnneChamfort.com was the same company that owned Maria’s Russian website domain. And just like Maria, a woman claiming to be Anne Chamfort traveled the world with her psychic predictions. Just as our articles were publishing, several media reports heralded her arrival in Vietnam—though we found little evidence that she gained international traction after that.
All these psychics were just some of the ones we found who had clear connections to Maria Duval and the businesspeople involved in her scheme—though they hadn’t faced government actions like her letters had or to our knowledge ever been charged with wrongdoing. From all the family members of victims we spoke with, we learned that there were dozens of other mail-order psychics bombarding the elderly with promises of big winnings and good luck.
For some reason, none of these psychics had become nearly as powerful—or valuable—as Maria.