Swedish ‘clairvoyant’ con-artist sent to prison

The woman, claiming to have contact with the spirit world and an ability to exorcise demons, also dispensed with advice on relationships.

By promising to help her victims attract love interests or keep loved ones safe, she managed to defraud her customers of huge amounts of money.

The court deemed the crime to be gross fraud as they found she had deliberately taken advantage of her victims’ longing for relationships.

Ursula Engstrand, now 74, was swindled out of close to half a million kronor by the fake psychic back in 2005 and 2006.

They spoke several times a week on the phone, with the clairvoyant eventually achieving such a dominant position in the relationship that she convinced her elderly client that she would fall victim to an accident if she did not do as she was told.

“It was brainwashing. She sent papers up to me and told me to sign them. I didn’t dare disobey her,” Engstrand told the Gefle Dagblad newspaper at the time.

The crooked clairvoyant also succeeded in fooling a millionaire out of more than 3 million kronor in 2003 after the wealthy woman made contact with the 48-year-old through a newspaper advertisement.

She was looking for advice about how to court a new love interest when she contacted the so-called soothsayer through a newspaper advertisement, reported newspaper Expressen.

“In order to pay, she sold stock, life insurance, mortgaged her apartment, and took out loans,” public prosecutor Åke Olsson told Expressen at the time.

A warrant for the clairvoyant woman’s arrest was first issued several years ago for suspected scams carried out as far back as 2002, but she managed to evade capture until police finally arrested her in March 2011.