How psychic phone lines work

[entropy]

A very nice post by Moebius Stripper:

How psychic phone lines work, according to the brother of the brother-in-law of a woman who founded one (http://talldarkandmysterious.ca/archives/2005/04/04/how-phone-psychics-work-according-to-the-brother-of-the-brother-in-law-of-a-woman-who-founded-one/)

[jmercer]

Very, very interesting. I wonder if it's true?

[Dermanus]

Sounds a little far fetched to me. Although it isn't hard to get call display, and tying that in with a system to recognize area codes might, could, maybe work. The whole thing still sounds a bit unwieldy though.

[Anon1]

We have a woman on our forum who used to work on a psychic phoneline.
After getting disillusioned by all the ******** she left, wrote her story
http://www.jonscelebworld.com/BadPsychics/Editorials/Misc/PsychicPhonelines.html

Shecomplained about the practices and help get the authorities on the bloke who ran it.

I am sure if anyone is interested she will tell you about it.

Either way read what she put as its an interesting article.

Jon

[arthwollipot]

Originally posted by Dermanus
Sounds a little far fetched to me. Although it isn't hard to get call display, and tying that in with a system to recognize area codes might, could, maybe work. The whole thing still sounds a bit unwieldy though.

Cold reading would be easier, even over the phone. And remember that this guy was postulating a conspiracy with Bell Telephones as well. That sets off alarm bells of its own.

[Ashles]

Originally posted by entropy
A very nice post by Moebius Stripper:

How psychic phone lines work, according to the brother of the brother-in-law of a woman who founded one (http://talldarkandmysterious.ca/archives/2005/04/04/how-phone-psychics-work-according-to-the-brother-of-the-brother-in-law-of-a-woman-who-founded-one/)
This does sound like a bit of an urban legend. It seems strange we have never heard the testimony of one of these many, many local 'psychics'.

Plus I can't really take any story seriously that involves the words "according to the brother of the brother-in-law of a woman who founded one".

Come to think of it, that's the kind of article that acually starts urban legends. If I were to tell that down the pub tomorrow night I bet I'd get some real interest.

[Psi Baba]

But there could be a kernel of truth in that. That certainly couldn't be the only technique they'd rely on, but I'm sure they'd take advantage of having that kind of edge on the caller. Most phone psychics work out of their homes anyway, so routing calls to particular areas wouldn't be difficult. The "local" psychic might not personally know the caller, but then again, they might, or at least they might know the community or the town (and therefore such things as company closures, famous deaths, local scandals, etc.), which could go a long way toward facilitating the cold reading process. Caller says, "I was laid off from my job recently." Psychic says, "You worked for ABC meat processing plant, didn't you?" (which psychic knows went under). Caller: "Wow!" But I agree that the part about Bell Telephone being in cahoots sounds unlikely. They used to charge a wopping lot of money for those 900 numbers (probably still do). What you did with them was your business.

[jmercer]

Well, I don't know if even a kernel of it is true, after thinking about it overnight. I grew up in a small town... my High School graduating class was about 70 people.

I would have been hard-pressed to come up with something about anyone outside of my immediate neighborhood...

[thaiboxerken]

Occam's Razor would suggest that the psychics on the phones really do have superpowers. ;)

[Chocolate Chip]

From the link:
Ten years or so ago, he told me, his brother married the sister of Josie the famous psychic from Quebec, a woman who so altered the historical landscape that I can’t for the life of me find a single mention of her on the internet.
He could be referring to this piece of work:

http://www.answers.com/topic/jojo-savard

I remember coming home from evening shifts, turning on the t.v. and seeing this viper with her huge oversized blond wig and super-duper glow in the dark ruby-red lipstick. She would always be shilling her hotline and yakking about "luv" and "spirit".
I think she branched out in the states for awhile but that seems to have went tits-up.
Here she is, get a good look:
http://www.geocities.com/carl123.geo/biographies/jojo.html

In anycase, this guy who claims to know how the psychic hotlines get your info. C'mon, let's see the proof, personally I think he's talking out of his arse.

[LostAngeles]

Chocolate Chip, I love that second link.

Jocelyne Savard, called Jojo, is Quebec astrologer. She has become a celebrity. Her face has launched millions of calls on late-night TV show from people seeking celestial guidance at the rate of $4.99 a minute. It's a very mysterious business. Over two million Canadians check into Jojo Savard's psychic alliance each days.

Jojo was born in Quebec City. She was the daughter of a merchant marine officer whom he adored and scarless ever saw. After years of following her father from port to port, shunting Jojo and her two sister in and out of convent school, her mother finally gave up on the marriage. Constantly hamming for the family, Jojo spun her own fantasy world, whipping up costumes on her sewing machine and during a period only wearing pink. Jojo didn't know at that time ,but she had an unsettling gift. At five, she had begged her mother to hide her two years old brother in a closet because the angels were going to take him away in a train. Weeks later, he was killed in a freak railway accident. Jojo found herself in Vancouver in 1981, where she landed her first short-live job as a television astrologer. But when she went back in montreal, she got a call from a producer for CFCF TV, who hired her to read horoscopes on the station's morning show.

After years, she became more popular. She has her own TV show. She can tell you everything that will happen to you. All you have to do is tell her the date of your birth and your name, you'll see !!!

Melanie Vaugeois

St. Patrick's High School
Canada


"...scarless ever saw...," "...spun her own fantasy world..."

[cthiax]

I'm a former professional psychic* in the U.S. (and new to the boards here, hello all!). I worked for a few different phone lines, in addition to doing parties, private consultations, and Tarot card readings in Washington Square Park in NYC.

There are two types of pay-by-the-minute lines - direct connection and dispatch. On a dispatch line, the caller reaches a live operator who connects you to a specific worker. If the worker gets any information at all about the incoming call, it comes from this dispatcher. The information would concern any topics the caller indicated to the dispatcher were of interest, whether the caller had called before, and any notes other workers may have left about the caller. You would never be given an address and rarely a last name. This type of system is very, very rare in psychic lines (more common with phone sex lines), as far as I know.

Mostly the psychic lines are automated, and every single call is as cold as can be. (I promise you, they are not being routed next door. The very idea is a joke, frankly). You 'call on' to the system (most of the time, setting your own schedule), which puts you in the queue according to your CTA, and wait. Eventually the phone rings (showing up as blocked on Caller ID) and your unknown client is on the other end. You're working completely blind.

Almost always the calls are routed to the worker's home on a "priority" system based on CTA, call time average. If your average call is an hour, you get major priority over someone with a 15 minute average (which is the industry standard both in psychic and phone sex work). That's it, the sole determinant of who, across the country, gets which calls as they come in.

I was paid something like eight dollars an hour (at a per-minute rate) as an independent contractor - so I was not eligible for benefits and had to pay my own taxes out of that. There is no guarantee of pay if no calls come, most of the time. The services charged clients something like $200 an hour, by the minute, of course. Due to the negligible overhead involved, this was basically all profit for the company.

Policies toward the workers are designed to keep turnover high, so the company can avoid workers demanding better compensation. They're certainly not going to go to extra effort (as described in the story linked to in this thread) to make the calls more convincing for the caller or easier for the worker - they don't have to, because the money just pours in regardless.

Most companies make you count hangups and minors (which you're responsible to screen out) against CTAs, so CTAs fluctuate wildly per worker. It only takes one day of too many instant (1 minute long) hangup calls or kids to get into a low priority ranking, meaning you stop getting calls and can't raise your average again as a result. No matter; five new suckers are waiting to take your place, lured by the promise of easy money from home. If there's any training at all, it's in the form of a packet sent to your home. You rarely if ever see your bosses face to face, and after you're hired probably won't ever even speak to them again.

It's a hell of a racket - for the companies. The workers basically get the big shaft - it's a lot of hard, stressful work for very little compensation and done in almost total isolation. A few who are good at keeping 'em talking do well, but it's a /very/ few, like people who actually get rich on Amway. As others have noted, it's more like amateur counseling than anything else. Most callers just want someone to talk to, and are all too happy to do most of the work for you, as usual failing to realize they're doing so.

Incidentally, James Randi and Penn & Teller had a lot to do with why I quit the industry forever.

*Never at any point did I believe myself to be psychic. I was genuinely able to 'read' Tarot cards - by which I mean I had studied what the cards were supposed to mean and how one was supposed to interpret them, a system which is designed to provide generalized answers which seem specific. I was also a natural cold reader to begin with, and practice only improved those skills. If I had not been aware of the processes behind cold reading for some time (before I even knew the term), it would have been easy to convince myself I was actually honing some magical ability, not just getting better at picking up clues.

[Anon1]

Hi,
we have a similar report from a woman on my site in the UK

I would love to be able to bring your experiences to the public through my site.

If possible could you email me on
webmaster@badpsychics.co.uk

It would be great to hear someone who has been through this but in America.

Thanks
Jon

[badnews]

Originally posted by entropy

...according to the brother of the brother-in-law of a woman who founded one... (http://talldarkandmysterious.ca/archives/2005/04/04/how-phone-psychics-work-according-to-the-brother-of-the-brother-in-law-of-a-woman-who-founded-one/)

Sounds like a standard "Urban Legend" begining...

[wahrheit]

Originally posted by cthiax
I'm a former professional psychic* in the U.S. (and new to the boards here, hello all!). I worked for a few different phone lines ... *snip*
Hello and thanks for your very interesting account on the psychic industry.

[Loki]

cthiax,

Thanks for the overview. Do you have any examples of calls that went particularly well? The "Big hit" that believers talk about?

[delphi_ote]

Originally posted by cthiax
*snippage for space*

Welcome to the board and thanks for an excellent post. Very informative! I feel we could learn a lot from your experiences about the psychic hotline industry.

I'm going to post some questions, but don't feel you have to answer them all. I'm just very interested!

Do you know if your experience is typical? Are there lots of disillusioned ex-psychic hotline workers running around?

How did you first find out about this? Was the job advertised?

From your experience, did it seem like the other workers actually believed they had powers?

Did the company you worked for try to encourage the worker's "powers" and encourage belief in powers, or were they more cynical to the realities of what they were doing? Were they catering at all to those workers who might be delusional?

What was the culture of the company like? Did they have a mission statement? I'd LOVE to hear that one...

Again thanks and welcome!

[Soapy Sam]

Now can someone explain how VOIP works?

[Janice]

Originally posted by entropy
A very nice post by Moebius Stripper:

How psychic phone lines work, according to the brother of the brother-in-law of a woman who founded one (http://talldarkandmysterious.ca/archives/2005/04/04/how-phone-psychics-work-according-to-the-brother-of-the-brother-in-law-of-a-woman-who-founded-one/)

Entropy - welcome to the forum.

I have raised this subject on a previous thread, and pointed out that some companies let customers paying by credit card have readings for up to 90 minutes @ £1.50/min (£135), I contacted two of the main companies in the UK to see what they had to say about it - the main response was that the customers found the services a great comfort? I also contacted ICSTIS to raise my concerns, about the length of time the callers can be kept on the line, and was told it was up to each individual caller, and that it was entertainment.

[subpers]

I think I'm psychic. in the post on bad psychics, I feel the letters D&A coming through for the medium recognised only as ***** ******. I also think theres someone linked to this called Glen, Gren, or perhaps Gwen.

I can also see a load of curly haired blokes nicking car tyres or anything else they can get their theiving hands on.

Does this mean anything to you ?

[Aoidoi]

Originally posted by Soapy Sam
Now can someone explain how VOIP works? Pretty simple, really. Voice is digitized using one of a number of codecs which save bandwidth by using specially designed algorithms to minimize the amount of data in the voice. This is then chopped up and stuck into IP packets which are then routed to whatever IP your destination is at. At the other end the packets are reassembled in real time and converted back to analog and thence to the receiver.

The only real problem with this is that IP does not provide a guaranteed quality of service. So if there is network lag there can be long pauses while your packets are routed through Timbuktu. There's also no guarantee your packets will travel the same path or arrive in order. For a real time application they generally just ditch packets that show up out of order, but that leaves gaps in the voice.

The fun technical part comes in the fact that phones don't have IPs, so you need some sort of computer to do the networking stuff and AD/DA conversion. As long as both ends are just computers then everything goes over IP and all are happy (I use Teamspeak during online gaming which works great at this sort of thing).

To hook into the public telephone network is more difficult. Then you need something to figure out which telephone number which IP goes to, and some sort of conversion box from IP to whatever the telephone service is using (mostly ATM, from what I understand). So calling a standard phone with VoIP requires some extra hardware, hence the companies that are selling this (Vonage, I believe, and others). They need to have some sort of deal with the TelCos to use their backhauls or at least the lines into the houses.

Then there's the whole issue of 911 requirements...

oh, wait. We were talking about phone psychics. Well, VoIP could theoretically reduce their overhead even further. Give their people VoIP connections and there's be a flat rate for all the calls routed to them per month. Course, it would probably be easier to track down locations and such using IPs, but then locations where area codes are wouldn't exactly be brain surgery to decode, either. The Chicago area has 5, I think. It's not like they're secret. A DB with the area codes and a list of operators in the neighboring ones would be pretty trivial. Backup would just be to assign a random one. A reverse lookup might even work if they're not blocking their number. But like most magic tricks, simple is better. No need for a technological solution when paying any person $8 an hour to talk nice to someone works just fine.

[Tanja]

Originally posted by entropy
A very nice post by Moebius Stripper:

How psychic phone lines work, according to the brother of the brother-in-law of a woman who founded one (http://talldarkandmysterious.ca/archives/2005/04/04/how-phone-psychics-work-according-to-the-brother-of-the-brother-in-law-of-a-woman-who-founded-one/)


Isn't the "brother of the brother in law" either also a brother in law, or the husband?

[bjornart]

Originally posted by Tanja
Isn't the "brother of the brother in law" either also a brother in law, or the husband?

D*mmit! I read through the whole thread hoping no one else will have pointed this out, and then you sneak in at the very end. :D

And I only clicked on this because I was hoping to get some early information on 4G mobile phones.

[Aoidoi]

Originally posted by bjornart
And I only clicked on this because I was hoping to get some early information on 4G mobile phones. Last I heard they were supposed to bounce signals off the ionosphere or some damn thing.

I expect they'll also read your mind to figure out who you want to call, cure cancer, solve world hunger, get 500 mpg, and give you every song ever recorded for free.

I also expect the requirements to be whittled down due to time constraints on development.

Gee, if this comes true does that make me psychic? ;)

[pyewhackett]

I just had published the sequel to an investigation into phone psychics, appearing in the Australian Skeptics magazine. I went through a four stage application process for a job as a telepsychic - and was offered a position!

I had to do an email reading, chat room reading and phone reading...simple. I just used cold reading and plenty of generalisations.

The company claims to only offer positions to 1% of applicants! So...as someone claiming NOT to have psychic abilities...I am placed in the top 1%!

Lots of fun!


Karen.
(p.s. there's no link to the articles at our website but email me if you want a pdf of them).

[Questioninggeller]

“The phone lines,� he told me, “They have a system, did you know that? There’s a, there’s a computer, it tells you where the called is from. Then the call is routed to the nearest phone psychic. And Bell telephone is in cahoots with this, did you know that? They get 30% of the revenue from this.�
...
“The phone lines,� he told me, “They have a system, did you know that? There’s a, there’s a computer, it tells you where the called is from. Then the call is routed to the nearest phone psychic. And Bell telephone is in cahoots with this, did you know that? They get 30% of the revenue from this.�



Interesting... I never thought about that angle, I assumed it was simply cold reading.