A Deal with the Devil

by Blake Ellis

  We had shown the friendly archivist at Nice-Matin a newspaper headline that a fan had posted online. When he couldn’t find the paper that should’ve shown the headline, we became convinced the story was a myth, as we’d initially assumed. If it were a photoshopped image used to lure in more victims, that would explain why the subject of the alleged rescue had morphed depending on who was telling the story.

  Once we were back in the States, the friendly archivist told us he’d found another article. It wasn’t the one we’d been looking for in the archives. This one, from 1978, was all about Maria’s various rescues over the years, glorifying her as “the nicest of the witches.”

  Local police and firefighters don’t hesitate to give Maria Duval a call after their regular efforts fail. She is always available and her pendulum is almost always right.

  It was clear that whoever wrote the article thought highly of Maria, saying that she greeted the author from a street by her garden, which was soaked in sunlight and filled with zodiac signs.

  It could be that one day we will witness the birth of the Witch Liberation Movement, and if they choose a flag-bearer, it will certainly be the nicest and most lovely of them all, Maria Duval of Draguignan—next to her, the old-timey images of witches with brooms, crooked fingers and noses are ridiculous.

  Then we noticed a mention of Saint-Tropez.

  Two years ago in Saint-Tropez, the wife of a doctor went missing, and all the search parties had been fruitless. The population, the vacationers, were in upheaval when a young woman came to the police.

  The woman was Maria, who according to the article asked for a photo of the woman and a map of the country, which authorities set up on a table in front of her.

  They all saw, at the end of a few minutes, the pendulum, until then moving, coming to a stop and stabilizing over a precise point.

  “She’s here,” said the young lady.

  Just in case, a helicopter [was sent] to the place indicated, not far from Gassin. The woman was there, hurt and unable to move.

  There it was, practically word for word, the same story we’d kept hearing—but again, with one key difference. This article mentioned a doctor’s wife instead of a dentist’s wife, like the story from Maria’s website. We had always assumed that the tale on her website was written by some creative copywriter. But perhaps it was actually a sloppy translation of one of these newspaper articles. The difference in the two stories really did all come down to one French word. This still didn’t explain, though, why Maria and Antoine had told the exact same story about a missing man rather than a woman. We still had a lot of questions and had a hard time believing that Maria could have found anyone with simply a pendulum.

  The article also included a number of other personal details about the psychic that we had seen in her letters but had ruled out as fiction. It talked about her ability to find missing animals, reminding us of how her letters claimed she had found Brigitte Bardot’s dog and of a trademark we once found for what appeared to be a business producing horoscopes for dogs. It said she had spent her childhood in Italy, raised by a family who had their own psychic powers. This included her uncle, a priest in a small village near Milan “who told her once, before she could understand it, that the golden strands inside her brown eyes gave her the power of communication.” It also said she had been examined by authorities who determined she truly was a psychic. Again, this all matched the letters, while the story of her uncle also mirrored what Maria had supposedly written in the book that Françoise sent us (though in the book her eyes had been described as green). The numerous small details in the article also matched much of what Antoine had told us, such as the fact that Maria had worked in art galleries and that she’d gone through several divorces.

  This article had a familiar byline. It was the name of a man who had written other positive articles about Maria. His writing seemed suspiciously similar to that of the self-proclaimed skeptic on her website. But as we searched online and enlisted the newspaper’s help to try to locate him, we couldn’t find any evidence of his current existence or a way to contact him. The people mentioned in his various articles were also nowhere to be found in our online searches. Without talking to this writer, it was impossible for us to verify that anything he had written was actually true, as the supposed rescues had happened decades ago. But his articles, published in a widely read reputable newspaper, seemed to have helped make Maria famous. They had convinced people for years that she was the real deal, everyone from locals in town to the newspaper archivist to the millions of victims who read these stories over and over again.

  Early in our journey, we had been convinced that Maria Duval was nothing more than a stock image. Once we determined she existed, we believed the letters were pure fabrications and we still doubted her powers. Real or not, however, the myth of Maria Duval was rooted in more than a copywriter’s wild imagination.

  The Responses

  Maria Duval is a living, breathing woman. And she really was known around France for her psychic gifts.

  It’s her name that has become a multimillion-dollar work of fiction. And it is this name that could live on forever—or for as long as people are getting rich from it.

  This is how our series on CNN ended, when it was published over a six-week period in the winter of 2016, while the US presidential debates and primary season were in full swing. But this wasn’t where the Maria Duval story stopped.

  Our obsession had spanned nearly half a year, and we were relieved to get the story of Maria Duval out into the world so we could move on with our lives. Shortly after our series ran, the US government announced it had finally shut down the massive Maria Duval scheme for good, after more than a decade of effort. A settlement was reached that Maria herself allegedly signed.

  We quickly began an entirely different investigation, this one into a modeling agency run by Donald Trump, then a presidential candidate. Our investigation found that Trump’s agency had profited from the very same visa program for foreign workers that he slammed in his campaign, and immigration attorneys told us that the agency appeared to have violated federal law. From there, we looked into the modeling industry as a whole, finding that labor abuses ran rampant throughout the industry. As we pored through visa records and interviewed countless financially exploited models, though, our email inboxes were being hijacked by people from all around the world who wanted to talk about one thing: Maria Duval.

  At first, the bulk of these messages came from victims and family members who wanted to share their own stories of drained bank accounts and outrage. Others came from armchair detectives whose curiosity had prompted them to do their own research and develop entirely new theories about Maria and the scam, some of which they posted online. A woman claiming to be a signature analyst, for example, posted a nearly nine-minute-long YouTube video about Maria’s signature, saying that the “M” suggested that Maria was a “devious” individual—going so far as to compare her signature to Hitler’s. Still more messages came from people with intriguing inside knowledge, which took us beyond Maria and into the world of mail fraud. There we found scammer after scammer who had created the kinds of letters that had filled Doreen’s mailbox for years, reminiscent of the same letters that started us on this journey in the first place.

  The Other Psychics

  AMID THE FLOOD of emails that were landing in our special-investigations inbox every day was a brief message from a French “astropsychologist” who called himself Dr. Turi.

  “Do not throw the baby with the water!”

  We initially overlooked this message, confused about what this person was trying to tell us. But then we noticed a blog post Dr. Turi had written. The rambling missive began with an apocalyptic GIF of fiery clouds and a quote warning his readers that the universe is “under no obligation to make any SPIRITUAL sense to anyone.”

  In the post, he blasted our story as an attack on the entire spiritual and psychic world, calling us innocent “kids” who knew littl
e of “the mysterious world they live in.” Then he went on to tell a personal story about his own experience with psychic mailings, in which he described an arrangement similar to the one Antoine had told us about Maria. We were hesitant to enter into a battle of words with this man, but our curiosity got the best of us. So we sent him an email asking if he would speak with us.

  Thank you for taking some of your precious time to answer my email. Be sure my world wide reading audience will enjoy this “debate” fully were [sic] I will offer solid proofs of my cosmic gift!

  We immediately began to regret our decision when we were subsequently bombarded with emails from his followers telling us about aliens, government cover-ups, the alignment of the moon and the stars, and how Dr. Turi had used his gift to change their lives. Apparently he had spread our email address far and wide, urging his supporters to get in touch. We called him anyway.

  When he didn’t answer his phone, we left a voice mail. Then we received an email from his wife, Mrs. Turi, who seemed skeptical of our motives and protective of her husband. Eventually we were able to get on the phone with both of them, and the phone call was one of the weirdest we had ever experienced. Dr. Turi and his wife often spoke over each other, at some points bickering dramatically. He patronizingly shushed her on multiple occasions, talked in circles, and was difficult to follow.

  He told us he had became trapped in a terrible business deal after signing a contract with a Canadian marketing company just a few years earlier. He said the company had called and asked him if he wanted to sign a contract that would allow it to use his “name and worldwide reputation” to promote its business. The company flew him and his wife to Toronto, put them up in a fancy hotel, wined and dined them, showed them around the office and shipment facility, and gave them a tour of the city. The trip ended with a meeting in the president’s office, where Dr. Turi signed a contract.

  He also explained much of this in multiple posts on his website, writing, for instance:

  I was certain my astrological expertise would serve a real solid purpose and as always, my unarguable, well-documented, dated predictions would be recognized as legitimate.

  After a few weeks, I received the sample to what was going to be mailed to hundreds of thousands people all over the world from Canada! To our dismay, NOTHING of what I sent them was used! Instead my solid daily guidance and predictions forecasts were turned into the very same type of deceptive Neptunian gibberish found in the CNN article [a reference to the Maria Duval letters he’d learned about from our article]. [The letters] used my name and my picture into a very famous psychic promising to find love, to win the lottery, to find lost pets and a myriad of nonsense that infuriated me for months to come.

  This all sounded very similar to what we had heard about Maria. Dr. Turi thought he would be able to offer some sort of valid service via the mail since he’d willingly signed a contract. Just like Maria, he claimed not to have realized what he was getting himself into.

  On top of this, he told us that he received only a few hundred dollars in royalties. He told us he got out of the contract as soon as he could, but the damage was done: many of the ardent followers he’d attracted over his years of work thought he was a scammer.

  “I’ve been conned,” he told us.

  • • •

  We still didn’t know what to think of Dr. Turi, but we began to see how someone could end up at the center of a scam beyond his or her control. His story also gave us a window into the booming business of mail-order psychics, indicating once again that sometimes all it takes for a shady company to profit is a compelling face and name. It made us think of Patrick, the psychic whose letter we’d found all those months ago in the pile of junk mail. It seemed that, like Maria and Dr. Turi, he too was also a living person.

  During our research into the businessmen involved with Maria, we’d come across a number of other psychics with their own supposed talents, personalities, and backstories. They all followed a strikingly similar pattern, and some of their websites and letters were almost identical. There was the elderly clairvoyant named Laetizia, who claimed to come from a long line of psychics on her family’s small Mediterranean island. A young woman wearing a brightly colored sari named Alisha boasted that she’d helped thousands of people solve their problems. And a blue-eyed girl named Rinalda said she’d received her psychic gift after falling into a coma from a terrible bout of appendicitis.

  All three of these supposed psychics had websites that claimed they could help people win money or find love, just as the letters from Maria and Patrick did, and as those from Dr. Turi apparently did as well. The websites also happened to trace back to our Swiss friend with the Sparks mailboxes, Martin Dettling. While we could find the stray complaint online about these three female psychics, for the most part they seemed to have gained little traction compared with the massive success and notoriety of the Maria Duval letters.

  We also discovered a young, handsome Swiss man who lived a secret life in Panama. With long, highlighted hair and earrings, Martin Zoller claimed on his website that he’d risen to international fame after using his psychic skills to find a missing plane in the jungles of Bolivia. Martin’s website was flashy and highly produced, and it appeared he had followers on social media who attended various events he hosted. He offered psychic guidance for a fee—but unlike Maria, his messages were sent by email, and he had never been publicly accused of any sort of wrongdoing. And again, one of the companies behind his psychic empire had its own Maria Duval connections. It was managed by a Swiss businessman tied to the scheme, and we soon found evidence that its main shareholder had made a donation to a nonprofit as a wedding gift for Jean-Claude Reuille, our pen pal living in Thailand.

  The most interesting of the psychic bunch was a woman named Anne Chamfort—another supposedly “world-famous” French clairvoyant. We first heard her name from our Astroforce whistleblower source, who said that she had been one of three psychic personas used by Jacques Mailland in the early years. Her name also appeared alongside Maria’s in online complaints from many years ago, but it seemed that her name had gone dormant as Maria became the star.

  When our stories about the Maria letters hit the internet, an anonymous source contacted us with some interesting information. She said she worked for a direct marketing company headquartered in Moscow that was currently sending out letters and psychic readings signed by Anne Chamfort. The source said it was clear that the Anne Chamfort letters were modeled directly after Maria’s and that they were currently being sent out in the Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia, South Africa, and Russia. “Anne Chamfort’s letters are just copy-paste versions of Duval’s letters,” she told us. “Take out Duval’s photos and stick in Chamfort’s.”

  Interestingly, the Russian company listed on domain registrations for AnneChamfort.com was the same company that owned Maria’s Russian website domain. And just like Maria, a woman claiming to be Anne Chamfort traveled the world with her psychic predictions. Just as our articles were publishing, several media reports heralded her arrival in Vietnam—though we found little evidence that she gained international traction after that.

  All these psychics were just some of the ones we found who had clear connections to Maria Duval and the businesspeople involved in her scheme—though they hadn’t faced government actions like her letters had or to our knowledge ever been charged with wrongdoing. From all the family members of victims we spoke with, we learned that there were dozens of other mail-order psychics bombarding the elderly with promises of big winnings and good luck.

  For some reason, none of these psychics had become nearly as powerful—or valuable—as Maria.

  The Checks

  WEEKS AFTER PUBLISHING our investigation, we set our sights on a little-known Canadian company cashing checks for the Maria Duval scam.

  PacNet Services, we learned, had profited from all kinds of global mail fraud for years. As we embarked on another months-long investigation, this time into PacNet,
we discovered that we weren’t the only ones interested in it. In fact, on the same day that our story was eventually published, the US government took an unprecedented action against this very company, labeling it a “significant transnational criminal organization” and landing it on the same short list as some of the world’s most notorious gangs and drug cartels.

  This designation may sound extreme, but after years of trying to shut down individual scams one at a time, the government’s effort had become a game of Whack-a-Mole. As soon as one was shut down, another would pop up in its place. Government officials hoped that by shutting down PacNet, they would shut down the scams as well.

  To truly understand how an obscure payment processor ended up on a list of criminals, you first have to understand how PacNet worked.

  Operating out of a nondescript high-rise in downtown Vancouver, British Columbia, PacNet made it possible for con artists to shield their operations from authorities and get their hands on millions of dollars sent in from victims using bank accounts set up in PacNet’s own name. In the case of someone like Doreen, the process would start when she received a letter, maybe one telling her she’d won $1 million. All she needed to do, the letter insisted, was to send in $20 to claim this life-changing prize. The letter looked official, so she would get out her checkbook and mail that $20.

  Payments like these often ended up with PacNet, which then deposited the money into an account under its own name and took a cut as a commission. It then held on to the rest of the funds, until they were eventually sent to the client’s own bank account. There were so many layers to this crime that victims typically had no idea that PacNet was even involved, except in rare cases where frustrated family members found fine print on the back of canceled checks and traced the deposits to PacNet.