Hot Reading in the 21st Century - How the modern medium cheats!

Recently I have written articles on a number of topics, in the hope of educating people and helping people fight back against the scam that is the psychic reading and/or Mediumship.

Catch up on those by clicking the links below.
How to expose a medium yourself.
and
Spiritualist Church Medium Secrets.

Today I want to take a closer look at how modern mediums will hot read their victims using modern. technology, and how you can take steps to prevent this, if you are still determined to visit these grief vampires.

In the Church Mediums article I spoke about "The Blue Book" method of hot reading, well this very old fashioned method works great in Spiritualist Churches, when you have the same people attending every week. But what about when a medium hires a function room in a hotel, or a library, where they will most likely be faced with people they have not seen before. Well many more experienced mediums will just stick to cold reading, especially if they have gig after gig every night of the week. It is simply not worth the hassle and time to employ stooges, use recording equipment and so on. Just go on stage, use a few pre-prepared characters which always seem to hit, like the young man who died on the motorbike, or the old man with emphysema, and so on. Go to enough shows and these made up characters seem to appear rather regularly.

It has been alleged that Sally Morgan employs various methods as well as cold reading, one being to get everyone to leave a message for a dead loved one in a bowl, which she will then pick out later in the show to connect with. Use your imagination here, and you can figure out what could possibly be going on. Not to mention the whole scandal of the ear piece which she denied using, then there was video of her removing this non existent ear piece, so she said that was for stage direction, and so on, a legal case against the Daily Mail, big pay out cause they couldn't prove it and so on.

Regardless of that, any time you see ANY medium perform using a madonna style headset be warned, despite what they claim, there is usually more going on. I saw that first hand at a Simon Peters show, when his mic picked up the secret feed he was getting in his ear.

No medium needs a head set, or head phones, or anything like that. They can hold a mic. It is real easy. Also beware of mediums with long hair, that also covers a multitude of sins.

These are all old school techniques, but I want to show you the new school techniques.

So you are on Facebook, and you hear of a new up and coming medium, he or she has been getting rave reviews, so what do you do? You go follow a page or join a group set up by said medium, you might add them as a friend on facebook, or you might end up making friends of other people in the group and you add them.

Suddenly your entire history is available to that medium should they want it.
And what do you do when a show is announced? You click "going" to show you are going to the show.

The moment you joined that group, followed that page, or added anyone vaguely connected to that medium, you lose all right to say "they had no way of knowing......"

Even the most careful of facebook user will not have covered every base when trying to protect their data.
You know those little games you play, those apps you give permission to, to give you a horoscope reading, that data is for sale. For all you know a medium you follow created that app, and guess what, when you gave that app permission, you gave it every detail on your account.

So right now I want you to go to Facebook. Using the menu, find the link to settings, then click on APPS.
You should end up here
https://www.facebook.com/settings?tab=applications

Now have a look through your apps. Is there a lot there? Yeah I thought so. My advice, remove the lot.

Next go to Timeline and Tagging Settings

Now to stop a nosy medium from snooping on your page, if they are not connected as a friend, then you need to tighten up these settings, have a look through and make them as secure as possible.

Next go to Privacy, again if needed make these settings much more secure.
The most important one to secure is your friends list, and you want to make it so that only you can view it.

Now why would I suggest this?

Well let's say I am a dodgy medium, maybe your photos are all private, your timeline is pretty secure, there is really nothing I can see on your profile unless I am your friend, so how can I gather info on you, well the first thing I would do is go to your friends list. I am gonna start by searching for people with your surname, that is the easiest way to find siblings, children, parents and so on. And what happens when someone dies who had a Facebook account? It ends up being left as a tribute page. So if I am a psychic and find the page of your dead relative, I can end up finding out everything I need to know to pretend they are coming through in a reading.

Other things you can do if you have access to someones friends list. You can look at profile pictures, maybe your best friend has you on their profile photo, this is gold to a psychic, for it gives them another way to research you, and if that friend doesn't have a secure enough account the psychic can look through photos and see what places you go, what you do and so on. It all helps when building up the reading. For example, is there photos of you in fancy dress at Halloween? The medium could say.

"They are telling me how much you like dressing up, they are showing me blue paint, would you understand that?"

Guess what, you dressed up as a Smurf for Halloween, but the medium had no possible way of knowing that did they?

Another setting to tighten up is the one about who can search for you using an email address. Even if you don't follow a mediums page or are in their group, maybe you book tickets to a gig online and use your email, guess what, that email just exposed your facebook page. 

One time I pointed that out to someone, and they said "but I didn't use my real email address" upon some slight investigative work, they had a @hotmail.co.uk address for facebook, but used a @yahoo.com email for booking tickets, but the bit before the @ was the same on both. And on both it was their full name with a dot and numbers. So even if you don't give your name when you book, you are giving your name in your email address. Search for that name, their location, check their likes and it is pretty clear if you have the right person.

The only way you can be safe with an email address is if it is a brand new one, never used anywhere before, and does not contain your name within it. This really should be common sense, but sadly so many people make this mistake.

So now your facebook is nice and secure, what else is there. Well of course there is Instagram. Again if your account is public, and your username is your real name, or anything easily searched for, you have just given the medium another way to find out info on you. You Gran died, what do you do? You put a RIP message on your Instagram, a photo of you with her and so on. And who will comment? People who knew her, and suddenly the medium has a load more people to use to find information about this dead relative.

So just two pieces of advice here, make your profile private, that will stop people seeing your photos as well as your friends list, and change your username to something completely unconnected to you, your real name or anything that could be guessed. DO NOT PUT YOUR REAL NAME ON YOUR INSTAGRAM!

Twitter, again same advice as above, check your permissions, now consider what you use Twitter for, the vast majority of people will have a public account on Twitter, so your entire history is now view-able, and can be downloaded in it's entirety in a matter of seconds. Imagine the sheer amount of data a medium can pick up from there. They have everything you have ever posted in front of them in a simple document file. Thousands of tweets, well they are unlikely to read through them one by one, but they can always do a search for keywords like RIP, Dad, Mum, Gran and so on. And very quickly a picture can be built up of someone. 

If you are on Social Media, unless you are incredibly careful and private, it is almost impossible to stop someone researching you. And however much you convince yourself that you cant be found from just a phone number or an email, try and google your own details, google your name, then click the images tag, google your email address, see what comes up. This info is all available to a medium who knows you are going to his gig and wants to hot read you.

Let's get away from social media a bit. In the old days when a medium would arrange a gig in a town, they would send someone to a local shop, buy the local paper, and look up the obituaries. In 2018 you don't even need to do this.

A random medium, Derek Acorah, he has a show tonight in Brierley Hill in Dudley, England.

Google "Brierley Hill obituaries" and you get multiple links to local papers that have a list of obituaries in them.

Many of the sites will even have a search function.

So I know that Steve McBobberson has booked a ticket for my show, or perhaps has clicked on the "Going" link on my facebook page. But I can't be bothered to search through their social media page, instead I can search for their surname on the obituaries for that local area. Maybe I get lucky and the name matches up. These obituaries will not only have the name of the person who has died, but their age, their relatives names, what they did for a living and sometimes even how they died.

If I am a medium, I am not interested in the 91 year old who died peacefully in her sleep, because it is unlikely that any of her relatives will feel the need to visit a medium. No I am interested in people who died at any age under 65, as that would be considered too young to die.

And now these obituary sites even have comment sections for each person who has died whereby people can leave messages. This is gold for a medium. So they go through names of people they know will be attending their show, they scan obituaries for surnames that match, they match up names of the living to that on their list. And if all of this is matching up, and if the person died young. Perhaps the obituary says something like "They were taken from us too young", then the medium can assume this person was in an accident, or even killed, and now the medium as the name of the dead, their relatives name and so on, a quick google search for "Bob McBobberson Accident" and it was probably covered in the local paper, and now you have the name and how they died as well as the names of all their relatives.

And all this from Steve McBobberson clicking "going" on a facebook event page, or from steve.mcbobberson@"£$%.com email address.

We live in a world where nothing is private, we moan about excessive CCTV cameras filming us everywhere, yet we invited the world into our living room through social media.

And criminals are taking advantage of this. You are making life easier for mediums than it has ever been in history. Yet you then tell me some medium told you something they had no way of knowing!?

Before you think the medium had no way of knowing something, ask yourself, what is more likely? Is it real, or were you fooled.

There is no shame in being fooled, it has happened to all of us, even me, but there is shame that after you are fooled you keep being fooled by the same trick. And if you do not do anything to prevent being fooled, especially in this age of technology and living our lives online, then you have to seriously question yourself and ask why you invite this upon yourself.

If you post on a forum, the webmaster can see your email address, they can see your IP, on some forums they can even read your private messages. However much you convince yourself that no one can research you, I promise you, you are wrong. And if there is a possibility that someone can research you, even if you consider that chance to be small, it is still infinitely more likely than your dead granny telling a medium that she thinks your new kitchen looks lovely.

Be smart. Try it yourself, research yourself. And then try to tighten up that security, it will never be perfect, and if someone is knowledgeable enough then can still figure things out, but ask yourself, if you make it really hard for a medium to cheat, then they are less likely to try and cheat you.

But of course my final piece of advice is simply to save your money, don't go to that medium, don't take the chance you will be conned.

By Jon Donnis