Ray William Johnson: True Story Podcast - This Fake Psychic Got Exposed - The Gina Marks Story

Episode Date: September 14, 2025

Gina Marks, often dubbed the “Psychic Scam Queen,” was a self-proclaimed psychic who conned multiple clients out of hundreds of thousands of dollars by claiming she could lift curses, reunite lovers, and cleanse their lives of bad luck.

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She's living in Florida, and Gina appears to really want to make money, even if she has to scam people to get it. And one day in the mid-2000s, she decides to become a fortune teller and a psychic, and, you know, she'll make money that way. And so she opens up a shop, and she starts doing really. for clients, clients who are mostly women. And the women, they're coming to her with all sorts of different problems. Problems with their careers, problems with their relationships, or whatever. And to her credit, her business seems to be doing really well. She's getting a lot of clients, and she becomes moderately well known in the area.

In 2006, she even writes a memoir about being a psychic, and it gets published. Here's the thing with all this, though. All of her psychic readings are obviously a scam. Like she'll be giving these clients a reading or like telling their fortune or whatever, and she'll tell them that they've somehow at some point had some evil curse placed on them, and that's why bad things are happening to them. So of course the women are like, oh my God, a curse, what do I do? And Gina's like, here's what you do.

And this is going to sound like I'm making it up, but I promise you I'm not. Gina tells these women that the root of all evil is money. So what they need to do is take a bunch of their cash and put it inside a black pillowcase. Then they need to stuff that pillowcase under their mattress and sleep on it for a few days. If they do this, the energy from their bodies will transfer to the money. Then once the energy is transferred to the cash, they just have to give that cash to Gina so that she can take it to her secret church and place. place it before the altar and perform like a ritual on it that cleanses the energy and breaks the

curses. After that, Gina says she'll give the money back to them. Here's the problem with all that though. As you probably could have guessed, Gina doesn't give the money back. Instead, she pockets it. Oh, but it doesn't stop there. Then she comes back to these clients and she tells them that her spirit guides have come to her and they've been speaking with her and telling her that they just don't have enough energy to work with, so, you know, if you could sleep with some more money under your pillow and bring it to me, that would really help these spirit guides out. And I guess some of these clients do. They're like, okay. And so Gina does these scams for a few years, and she just keeps conning person after person after person. And now eventually, we get into 2008. And that is when this guy

comes into the story. His name's Bob. And Bob's a private investigator living in Florida as well. One night, Bob goes out to a local bar, and as a single guy, he meets two women there, and he starts chatting them up. You know, he's probably trying to impress them like, I'm a private investigator, I catch scammers, and he ends up giving them his number in case they want to smash or whatever. Later, one of those women ends up calling him and saying, actually, I was scammed out of $12,000. Can you help? And it turns out that at one point, this woman had been scammed by Gina. And so Bob's like, hell yeah!

And he starts looking into it. And he sees that Gina is a psychic, but she's not just any psychic. She's locally famous and, you know, she's published a book and all that. And he can see that she's living a lavish lifestyle and buying herself luxury things, driving around in nice new cars, going out to fancy restaurants all the time, owning several homes. And so Bob's like, oh yeah, she's a scammer. And so he starts investigating and he tracks down four more victims of Gina's scams. And collectively they had been scammed out of $65,000.

And so he gets charges brought against her, which leads to even more victims coming forward. And bam, she gets arrested. Here's one of her muckshots. And so she's found guilty and she gets sentenced to probation and she has to pay her victims back. Plus, she's no longer allowed to do psychic readings for people. You're banned from being psychic, I guess, was what the judge said. said. But of course, pretty quickly, she gets caught scamming more people. She scammed like $300,000 total this time. And this violates her probation, so bam, she gets arrested again.

Here's one of her other mugshots. But this time, she gets sentenced to 18 months in prison. However, this is actually where things get worse. Because Gina, she can't just suddenly stop grifting, because then she'd have to admit that she's not really a psychic. and, you know, what fun would that be? And so she eventually gets out, and she wants to keep scamming. But she can't do it in Florida because that's where Bob is

and he might be monitoring her, waiting for her to slip up again. So in 2015, she decides to grift somewhere else, and she moves from Florida all the way up to Maryland. Once she's in Maryland, she changes her name, and she opens up her psychic fortune-telling business under her new name,

readings by Natalie. And here, not only is she giving people magic tarot card readings or whatever, but this time she's updated her playbook to keep up with the times. On top of her, put the money in a black pillowcase scheme, she starts using technology to con her clients. Like she'll tell a client that an ex-boyfriend of theirs will call them at a specific time, but that they must not answer the phone. And then Gina will use technology to spoof the ex-boyfriend's number and she'll call the client. And so the client will be like, oh my God, They did call. You're so psychic.

And so it seems like Gina is just going to keep conning people for as long as she can, as long as she can find people to fall for it. Until. Until she finally scams the wrong person. Because one day, around 2016, a woman comes to Gina's business to get a tarot card reading. Because she, I guess she's just gone through a breakup and she thinks this is somehow going to help her get her ex-boyfriend back. And so Gina's scamming ass is like, yeah, I can help you. And she tells her to pay her $1,500 and that she will use her psychic abilities to reunite her with her ex.

And so the woman pays her. And Gina has her do all kinds of weird psychic hocus pocus. She has her light candles and cover her body with dye, bathe herself in magic oils and like recite prayers and nonsense. And even after doing all that, surprise, surprise, the woman's ex still doesn't get back with her. And so this woman comes to Gina. And Gina tells her that her spirit guides need to be convinced that she's serious about getting back with her ex. And therefore, this woman needs to pay her even more money. And of course, this is where Gina pulls her, hide the money in a black pillowcase trick and sleep on it to like boost the magic energy or whatever bullshit.

And this poor woman is so desperate that she does it. Now eventually, the woman runs out of funds and she starts maxing out credit cards. And over a bunch of sessions, this woman pays Gina $82,000. Gina even convinces her to buy designer purses on credit and to bring those purses to her so that she can cleanse them on the altar at her secret church, which you know is bullshit. You know, she's just gonna like keep these purses. Now, this woman isn't the only woman Gina has scammed in Maryland. She's conned quite a few people out of a total of $341,000. So it's quite a few people. Quite a few people in Maryland.

Now eventually, one of these women she scams hears about Bob and how he's a private investigator who has busted Gina before. So this woman hits him up and Bob learns that Gina is still out there pretending to be psychic, running her scheme,

just under a different name now. And so he contacts local police. And ultimately, they track her down and so, bam, Gina is arrested. Here's some footage of her actually getting stopped by police. And here's another one of her mugshots. And ultimately, she ends up taking a plea deal and she gets sentenced to six years in prison.