In Sure and Certain Hope

A woman who posed as a spiritual con artist has been jailed for ten years after being found to be merely a financial con artist. She took money from her dupes on the pretext that people would dance around it in the Amazon rain forest and then send the money back, thereby solving all worldly difficulties. Instead of contenting herself with a reasonable commission, the enterprising lady appropriated the entire financial sacrifice for herself, thereby opening herself to the charge of fraud. The judge who sentenced her said she had cast a spell over her victims and threatened them with terrifying consequences, and called it "the worst case of confidence fraud I have ever had to deal with or indeed that I have ever heard of" because the victims' lives had been wrecked out of pure greed rather than from any genuine spiritual motivation. Had the putative healer only thought to dress in sackcloth and throw her ill-gotten gains at an established church, all might have been forgiven.