The excellent badpsychics team are organising a petition:
"The Fraudulent Mediums Act 1951 has rarely been used in the prosecution of mediums and psychics, who claim to contact the dead relatives of people. Yet there are increasingly more TV shows and live acts where people claiming to be mediums and psychics prey on vulnerable people who have lost loved ones, giving them spurious information and taking their money.
We call upon the Government to revise the Fraudulent Mediums Act and make it easier to prosecute these people.
http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/mediums/
Regardless of your opinions of this site, regardless of your beliefs, sceptic or believer, we can all agree on one thing, and that is that the FMA 1951 is a joke. We must have a proper way to stop the frauds out there."
The petition has started an interesting debate in their comments section. It's a tricky area this one, it might not be a good idea to prosecute individual "psychics", unless they are engaged in direct financial fraud, however, surely the TV regulators should be doing a better job of stopping TV stations proclaiming uncritically that psychics really do have special powers by way of encouraging vulnerable people to ring their station, at a financial cost to themselves, and at a profit to the TV company. This is clearly dodgy and something needs to be done.
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