The Story of One Fraud: TV Fortune Teller Miss Cleo In the late 1990s, a woman with a distinct Jamaican accent, a handkerchief and tarot cards appeared on American television. She looked straight into the camera and said: "Call me now! " - "Call me now! ” Late night show viewers called in a network of psychic readers to talk to Miss Cleo, a shaman who was allegedly born in Jamaica and spent her life telling fortunes. Her name was actually Uri Del Harris. She was born in 1962 in Los Angeles, to an American family, and had never been to Jamaica. Before television, she worked in theater, producing her own plays in Seattle, and once created a character, a Jamaican shaman named Miss Cleo. This image was submitted for publication in Phone Line Psychic. For the first photographs they paid about one and a half thousand dollars. Yuri later signed a contract according to which the rights to the photo remained with the company forever, and she herself received a salary without part of the proceeds. The line operated according to the classic toll system. A free consultation was advertised, but in practice the first few minutes were spent collecting data or waiting, after which the meter ran at $4.99 per minute. Many calls were not answered by Miss Cleo, but by other script operators. The company owed the viewers about a billion dollars. In 2002, the Federal Trade Commission accused the chain's owners of fraud and unfair billing. Harris has not been named as a defendant in this case. The owners agreed to write off about half a billion dollars in customer debt and pay a fine of 5 million. After the scandal, Miss Cleo almost disappeared from the screens. Harris died in 2016. And the image she created for the theater and then sold to television turned out to be so convincing that millions of people called her, even though she herself had almost nothing to do with the money the line made.

The Story of One Fraud: TV Fortune Teller Miss Cleo In the late 1990s, a woman with a distinct Jamaican accent, a handkerchief and tarot cards appeared on American television. She looked straight into the camera and said: "Call me now! " - "Call me now! ” Late night show viewers called in a network of psychic readers to talk to Miss Cleo, a shaman who was allegedly born in Jamaica and spent her life telling fortunes. Her name was actually Uri Del Harris. She was born in 1962 in Los Angeles, to an American family, and had never been to Jamaica. Before television, she worked in theater, producing her own plays in Seattle, and once created a character, a Jamaican shaman named Miss Cleo. This image was submitted for publication in Phone Line Psychic. For the first photographs they paid about one and a half thousand dollars. Yuri later signed a contract according to which the rights to the photo remained with the company forever, and she herself received a salary without part of the proceeds. The line operated according to the classic toll system. A free consultation was advertised, but in practice the first few minutes were spent collecting data or waiting, after which the meter ran at $4.99 per minute. Many calls were not answered by Miss Cleo, but by other script operators. The company owed the viewers about a billion dollars. In 2002, the Federal Trade Commission accused the chain's owners of fraud and unfair billing. Harris has not been named as a defendant in this case. The owners agreed to write off about half a billion dollars in customer debt and pay a fine of 5 million. After the scandal, Miss Cleo almost disappeared from the screens. Harris died in 2016. And the image she created for the theater and then sold to television turned out to be so convincing that millions of people called her, even though she herself had almost nothing to do with the money the line made.