Bryan Greene

But behind the scenes, she wasn't a boss.

She was just the face, someone who promoted the network.

The network made hundreds of millions of dollars, while Ms.

Cleo herself was reportedly paid very little and in financial trouble.

When the FTC cracked down in 2002, the Psychic Readers Network was accused of deceptive advertising, aggressive billing practices, and straight-up fraud.

Federer and Stoetz settled for $500 million in forgiven customer debt.

Ms.

Cleo, well, she didn't actually go to jail despite the rumors, but her career was certainly over, and she came close.

After all of the dust settled and all of the spirits went back to wherever the spirits came from, she publicly came out as gay, did some voiceover work — she was even in Grand Theft Auto — and spent her life doing smaller readings until her death in 2016 from colon cancer.

So yeah, just to be clear, Ms.

Cleo was not Jamaican, wasn't a millionaire, and wasn't running the scam.

But she became the symbol of TV psychic culture, the one we all remember when we think of late-night infomercial fraud.

So after Miss Cleo went away and left a big hole in the teenage I'm-so-high-I-can't-see-straight entertainment gap, whole country back then was getting hot, you'd think America would have learned its lesson, right?

Well, of course not.

We're America.

We don't ever learn our lesson.

We just move psychics out of the infomercial and put them on prime time.

the 2000s was about to become the golden era of psychics on TV.

And as far as I can tell, it hasn't stopped.

It's only getting worse.