‘Psychic’ busted for allegedly scamming woman out of $12K

New York Post/November 30, 2018

By Rebecca Rosenberg

A Westchester County “psychic” has just been busted for the third time in fewer than two years — this time for allegedly bilking a woman out of her life savings by convincing the client she’d been cursed in a past life as a mute Egyptian healer.

Accused serial Scarsdale scamster Janet Lee, 44, was arrested Tuesday in Bedford and charged with third-degree grand larceny for allegedly ripping off a 64-year-old local resident for more than $12,000, according to court documents.

The woman had sought out Lee’s services in June after growing “despondent” that she’d never achieved her dream of a career in writing or filmmaking, according to a statement provided to The Post by Bob Nygaard, a private investigator she recruited to help bring the psychic to justice. Nygaard said the statement also was submitted to authorities.

The woman said Lee told her there had been “a dark force” plaguing her since her days as an Egyptian miracle worker on a mountain thousands of years ago — and the bad vibes had been placed on her by a rapist she refused to heal.

She said she ended up giving Lee her sole retirement fund, an IRA worth more than $11,000, and quit her job to help “cleanse’’ herself.

She said she handed over the cash outside St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan, where she says the psychic claimed to have an “office.”

“Janet told me to go into the church, to walk down the left side of the church, to kneel and pray before the shroud of Christ and to leave all the darkness behind,” the woman said through Nygaard. Lee allegedly told her she would put the cash in a lock box at the cathedral for safekeeping until the cleansing work was done.

A few days layer, the woman said she did a Web search on Lee — and discovered she was a convicted felon who’d been sued in Connecticut for an alleged scam that closely mirrored her own experience.

“My world came crashing down, having come to the realization I had been conned,” said the woman.

Lee was first busted in Manhattan in June 2017 on identity-theft and forgery raps for posing as another woman to rent a luxury Soho pad apartment. She later pleaded guilty in exchange for three years’ probation.

She was arrested again this past June and hit with grand-larceny and scheme-to-defraud charges for an allegedly fortune-telling scam in the Westchester town of Mount Pleasant. She pleaded not guilty.

She was also sued in Stamford, Conn., last year by a Greenwich woman named Sheila McKiver, who said Lee conned her out of $32,900 by telling her she’d found a “terrible darkness” around her during a Tarot-card
reading in 2015.

Earlier this month, a judge found in favor of McKiver and ordered Lee to pay her $30,000, court records show.

Nygaard says he has been trying to get authorities to arrest Lee for years. The Westchester DA declined to comment. Lee couldn’t be reached for comment.

Additional reporting by Ruth Brown

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