What's the advice of a psychic worth?

Canadian psychic superstar Jo JO Savard and her famed Payshic Alliance claimed to have the ability to reveal the fortunes of milllions.

But in the end, she didn't see her own business failing.

Former police officer Rob McConnell is demanding a crackdown on psychics, who he alleges are breaking the criminal code by selling their pipe-dreams to the public.

The bottom line, he claims, is while callers pay bucks for an answer to the right lottery m=numbers, a hot stock or billionaire boyfriend, its the psychic who walks away with the money.

And through slick telemarketing campaigns on 1-900 hot lines, they're flogging their wares right across North America from psychic boiler rooms in Canada.

Average cost is $4.99 a minute while face-to-face readings can fetch up to $150.00 or more.

The real smart operators, he adds, not only tell fortunes, but run phone sex lines, too.

"It makes my blood boil that these psychics are using 1-900 numbers to take advantage of the public," said McConnell, publisher of The 'X' Chronicles, a monthly newspaper that reports on everything from UFOs and alien abductions to ghosts and poltergeists.

His newspaper, published from offices in Mississauga, began in May 1995, and now has a loyal reading right across North America. McConnell says he refuses to accept 1-900 psychic advertisements.

He raved about how Ontario MPP Frank Klees fought against employment services using 1-900 numbers, and won a CRTC ruling that phone companies could no longer act as billing and collection agents.

"If the CRTC can make that ruling against job advertisers, it should do the same for psychics," said McConnell.

'CRAFTY SCIENCE'

Section 365 of Canada's criminal code states it's against the law for anyone to "fraudulently pretend to exercise or to use any kind of witchcraft, sorcery, enchantment or conjuration, or undertake, for a consideration, to tell fortunes, or pretend from his skill in or knowledge of an occult or crafty science to discover where or in what manner anything is supposed to have been stolen or lost."

RCMP Corporal Patrick Prentice explained anyone who lodges a complaint and tries to take a psychic to court "must prove that there was an intent to deceive and defraud."

He added that proving fraud could, "could depend on the state of mind of a person asking to have a fortune read, as well as the representations made by the person telling the fortune."

McConnell says he's received numerous complaints, in writing and by phone from people who feel they've been led astray by psychics.

But both the RCMP and the Ontario consumer ministry say psychic complaints are very few.

Meanwhile, psychics maintain they do have a gift for telling the future and their clients want the service. As well, many use the disclaimer, "for entertainment purposes only" in their advertisements.

Now, here's my advice. If you really want to create some real wealth, then take the money and invest regularly in the investment of your choice.

There's no magic in the beauty of compound interest.

And isn't it better to put your hard-earned cash in your own pocket, not a psychics?