Ray William Johnson: True Story Podcast - Fake Psychic Medium Scams The Mayor - The Sophia Martinez story

Episode Date: February 4, 2025

This is the story of Sophia Martinez, the fake psychic medium who fooled Gilles d’Ettore, the mayor of a small town in France called Agde.

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And Instagram will continue adding built-in safety features to help create age-appropriate experiences. Learn more about teen accounts and Instagram's ongoing work to protect teens online at Instagram.com slash teen accounts. So this guy, let's call him mayor. And mayor has a great life. He's the mayor of Agda, this town in France, and this town is actually the Swinger capital of the world. So I guess everyone there just be smashing. Sounds like fun. But as fun as that sounds, not everything is going so great for Mayor, because his dad passed away a few years back. And Mayor wants nothing more than to communicate with his dad one last time.

And one day he gets to do just that. He reaches out to a psychic medium for health. Her name's Sophia. And of course, Sophia is like, yeah, I can communicate with the dead. I can totally help you talk to your dad. And awesome, so they get together and they hold some kind of like seance, probably with candles and all that shit. And Sophia starts to channel the spirit of Mayer's father. And Mayor can hear his father's actual voice for the first time in years, and this is life-changing for him.

Except Sophia is full of shit. She isn't actually talking to the dead, she's actually using her rather impressive ventriloquism skills to make her voice sound like the mayor's deceased father. And poor mayor, he wants to believe so bad that he falls for this scam, and he believes that he's talking to the spirit of his dad. And so he keeps these sessions with Sophia going regularly. He meets up with her and she does her fake psychic mumbo-jumbo, and he gets to talk to his dad. And he's happy.

And Sophia even starts doing these psychic sessions over the phone. Like I guess one day mayor will just be chilling at home and he'll suddenly get a phone call from his dead dad like, Hey, how you doing son? Which that doesn't even make sense to me. Like that has got to be the laziest ghost I've ever heard of. Like, sorry son, I can't float over to where you are, I have to call you from the afterlife. That's ridiculous. But anyway, Mayor is just relieved to be communicating with his father.

And over time, he grows really grateful to Sophia, for helping him do this. Here's the thing about Sophia. She's twice divorced and has six kids, and that's fine, but that is a lot of mouths to feed on a single income. And so, Sophia, she comes up with a plan to leverage mayor's gullibility to make sure she and her family are taken care of financially.

And so then one day, Mayor gets a phone call, and it's from an unknown number. And he picks it up, and the voice on the other end is like, Hello, Mayor, it's Archangel Michael. Now, if you don't know who the Archangel Michael is, it's this mythological creature from religious lore, and since Mayor has been talking to his dead father pretty regularly on the phone, when he gets a call from Archangel Michael, he doesn't really question it.

And so Archangel Michael is like, Mayor, I need you to protect and take care of Sophia and her family. And Mayor is like, all right. Now, obviously, this isn't really some mythological creature calling him on the phone, It's just Sophia, using her voice acting skills to put on a fake voice and trick him. Regardless, poor mayor falls for it again. And he starts helping Sophia and her family financially in all kinds of ways. So on top of paying her regularly for her psychic services, he starts having his chauffeur drive her kids to school.

He starts paying their kids tuition. He pays to have her kitchen renovated. He pays to get her a new porch. treats her and her kids to luxury vacations to Thailand and the Polynesian islands. And when Sophia gets engaged to a man, Mayor goes ahead and pays for her whole ass wedding, which cost 80,000 euros, or about 90,000 US dollars. Now, here's the thing about all this money Mayor's been spending on this fake psychic. Mayor isn't really a super rich guy, so he has to get this money in some other way.

And he starts leveraging his local business connections to get people to do the work for free. And these local businesses, they're afraid. They don't want to lose their contracts with the mayor's office, so they all agree to do all this work for Sophia for free. And when mayor actually needs to pay for some of these gifts to Sophia, he has his mayoral staff create fake invoices for the cost, meaning the taxpayers are actually the ones paying for all of Sophia's shit. And this crazy symbiotic relationship goes on for four years.

And during that time, mayor gets thousands of phone calls from spirits beyond the grave, aka Sophia putting on a fake voice. And these spirits convince mayor to hire Sophia's family members to work for the city. And they get mayor to hire her husband and five other members of her family. And some of her friends get hired to work on his counsel. And I know it sounds crazy, but Sophia's psychic. medium ventriloquism scam seems to be working really well. Until.

One day, Mayor's estranged wife, she somehow discovers that Mayor has been embezzling all these city funds to pay for all of Sophia's needs. So, estranged wife immediately goes to the police to report him. And police are like, sacri blue, or whatever the hell French police say. And the French police, they look into it, and they end up wiretapping mayor's phone, and they start listening in to all his calls. And pretty quickly, they start hearing all these phone calls he's allegedly getting from mythological creatures

and spirits beyond the grave. And they're like, what the fuck? And of course, they trace those calls and all those calls aren't coming from the afterlife. They're coming from Sophia's phone. So they bring Mayer in and Sophia in for questioning, and they press Sophia, and it's not long before she cracks and she admits that it's all a scam.

So they arrest Mayor and they arrest Sophia. And I couldn't find mugshots of them. So here's Mayor in real life. And here's Sophia in real life. And they're both charged with all kinds of things and they're both in jail waiting on their trials. But Sophia actually had to be moved to solitary confinement because apparently the other prisoners were accusing her of witchcraft

and they were beating the shit out of her. So that's nice.