Who could have predicted that the last few years would see such a vast increase in social media spam? Certainly not professional tarot card readers, whose identities have become ripe opportunities for online scammers looking to exploit gullible consumers. This has been a worsening issue in the spiritual advisor industry since at least 2021. Still, it's reaching a turning point, according to a recent article in The Guardian—to the point that witches and their ilk are trying to fight back with their software.
From the article:
In May 2023, [professional tarot practitioner Rebecca] Scolnick joined a new online tarot website, Moonlight, which launched in March 2023 and advertises itself as the first tarot-specific online marketplace. It was founded by product designer, artist, and longtime tarot reader Danielle Baskin in part to address impersonation scams and similar issues, in addition to streamlining the professional tarot space. Scheduling and payment capabilities built into the software lend Moonlight legitimacy in an industry that is not often taken seriously by platforms or regulators.
"It's a novel concept, but it's a long time coming," said Baskin, who has described Moonlight as "SaaS for witches", referencing "software as a service" companies and products like Salesforce or Figma.
[…]
"The biggest issue facing online tarot readers now is just the fight for credibility," Scolnick said. "You're always having to prove yourself to be legitimate, whether that's to a payment processor or to a platform, and having to say, 'I run a business, and I don't deserve to have my clients be preyed upon by all of these fraudulent accounts.'"
'Software for witches': tarot readers fight rampant online impersonation with their own tech [Kari Paul / The Guardian]
Leaving aside the obvious jokes about like "wow I can't believe they didn't see this coming," the article in The Guardian illuminates some genuinely interesting complications. Social media services such as Instagram and TikTok typically offer "verification" services—blue checkmarks, as it were—to help business accounts prevent these kinds of problems. But those services are not typically offered to tarot practitioners or other psychic/medium/spiritual professionals. From a business standpoint, this may make some sense—after all, how do you prove to Instagram that you are a legitimate business providing spiritual services, rather than, ya know, a con artist using the guise of spiritual services to scam people out of money (an assumption that, presumably, many spiritual service providers already have to struggle with on a regular basis, for better or for worse).
As a result of that verification ambiguity, these spiritual service professionals also struggle with the automated scam-detection services used by most payment processing services. If you're a psychic who takes payments through Venmo, for example, what's to stop a dissatisfied customer from complaining to Venmo that they had never authorized a payment to you in the first place? Venmo will eventually assign a Fraud Specialist to investigate the claim, but that specialist may just assume that the psychic is a scam anyway—even if the customer did indeed knowingly and willingly agree to payment in exchange for their services (regardless of how legitimate those services may actually be).
And, of course, this is all further complicated by the fact that, in our post-COVID-19-outbreak world, there are indeed a lot of con artists on social media using exploitative emotional appeals to things like mental health and spiritualism in order to manipulate people into giving them money. It can be difficult enough to tell the legitimate ADHD influencers from the con artists; how do you police that with tarot readings?
