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Making a fortune by telling fortunes
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IRELAND. There’s a lot of money to be made from telling fortunes.
The company behind Irish Psychics Live – Realm Communications – made an incredible €2.6 million (£1.75m or $3.34m) profit after tax in its financial year to April 2006, on a turnover of €5.7 million. That’s an increase of 170 per cent.
According to a report in “Irish Independent” (17 August 2006) by Tom Lyons, the businessman who founded Realm, chief executive Tom Higgins, said between 35,000 and 40,000 people used his services “regularly” last year. Many users, he added, paid €2,500 a year for psychic advice.
He credited much of the success of the psychic phone lines to a broadcaster who had branded them “utterly worthless”.
Realm’s income is generated not only by the “psychic consultants” but also by other premium phone line services. Higgins’ interest in the paranormal is said to have been prompted by a UFO sighting in the 1960s.
Higgins is operating in what is becoming a crowded market.
“At every turn there are psychic advice websites popping up. They may have different names, but in essence, they really are all the same.”
You may think that quote comes from a sceptic. No so. It’s to be found in a press release, dated 13 February, from – you guessed it – yet another psychic advice website.
So what makes this one different to the others?
“I wanted to build a website where everyone is a winner. The callers are guaranteed the lowest prices to call their favorite psychics, and the advisors receive a larger percentage of the profit,” says its owner.
He claims that it has “a wide variety of advisors … able to answer the most pressing questions pertaining to business, career, love and relationships. The “certified” [by whom?] psychic mediums communicate with departed love ones, the remote viewers are able to locate lost objects, the empathic or clairsentient readers have the ability to verbalise the feelings of an individual, and some advisors can even read for your pet.”
Sounds like any other psychic advice website – using mostly anonymous advisors whose only “ability” is to make money for themselves and the website owner. Which is why we’re not prepared to give it any publicity at all.
We are, however, more than prepared to name one psychic advice website … not to publicise its activities but to draw attention to the absurdity of its claims.
ELuminay.com bills itself as one of the Internet’s “new breed of mystic, psychic, paranormal and spirituality sites” and boasts a “live spiritual advice network” which it regards as better than others – don’t they all?
It announced (2 March) that it is going a step further and partnering with Click4Advisor to enhance its services with the introduction of “the Internet’s first artificially intelligent metaphysical and spiritual chat robot.”
Would you accept advice – paranormal or otherwise – from a robot? Of course not. What this website is doing is simply applying computerised methods to deal with the thousands of requests it gets from gullible people, dressing it up as if it is some sort of breakthrough.
Those who seek its help, in my opinion, have less intelligence than the robot they are “consulting”.
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Posted on Monday, September 04, 2006
Category: Future
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