Miss Cleo

American spokeswoman for a psychic hot line, claiming Jamaica as her birthplace to feint more glamour and mystery than California County hospital. Acting on more than 2,000 complaints, state authorities have sued Access Resource Services Inc. and Psychic Readers Network for fraud, alleging the service misrepresented costs, billed for services never purchased, harassed consumers with unwanted telemarketing calls and responded to consumer complaints with abusive, threatening language. Harris has been challenged to prove she really is a renowned shaman from Jamaica. Her national television commercials promise insights into love, money and other personal matters, designed to bilk the gullible. Florida was the eighth state to move against Feder and Stolz, who launched the Mind and Spirit psychic network in 1999 but had been running other telephone psychic operations since 1993. The state originally held ARS to a series of agreements in which the company agreed to a number of stipulations, including that it change its advertising to make it more clear that callers would not speak directly to Miss Cleo. Since a Courttv.com investigation in January found that many of the psychics who staff the psychic hotline, which charges just under $5 per minute, use scripts instead of performing actual tarot card readings, the troubles for the shaman and ARS have piled up. UNPLUGGED: Access Resource Services and Psychic Readers Network, the two companies behind the Caribbean-inflected phone-in psychic Miss Cleo, have agreed to disconnect their service and pay $5 million to settle charges that it misled customers looking for a supposedly free glimpse into their futures, the Federal Trade Commission announced Thursday, reports Reuters. "I'm no psychic, but I can see this: If you make deceptive claims there will be an FTC action in your future," said Howard Beales, head of the agency's consumer-protection division. Miss Cleo came up with a $5 million fine on 14 November 2002 to settle federal charges that her Pyschic Hot Line was fraudulent and deceptive. Harris voiced the character Auntie Poulet in the 2002 video game Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. She married at age 19, gave birth to a daughter, and divorced at age 21. She had a second daughter while in her late 20s. In 2006, she came out as a lesbian. Harris had colon cancer that eventually spread to her other organs, and she died in Palm Beach County, Florida on the morning of 26 July 2016, aged 53, following a long illness. Link to Wikipedia biography