According to news reports, 42-year-old Gina Miller operated a business called Gina's Psychic Studio. She was accused of stealing $1.4 million from 12 clients over a 15-year period:
(Assistant Lake County Prosecutor Charles) Cichocki said Miller charged $50 to $75 a session to determine a person’s frailties through cold readings, quickly sizing up victims through high-probability guesses. She then charged victims a larger fee to get to the root cause of a problem — usually to get rid of a curse.
“Many victims were seeking answers for problems that made them highly susceptible to her psychological tactics,” he said. “Once all their cash was gone, she tricked them into leasing vehicles for her or giving her Rolex watches.”
Miller would tell her clients that they or a family member would be struck with tragedy, illness or death if they failed to let her help them get rid of the “darkness,” Cichocki added.
She isolated victims from their family members, and warned clients her work would fail if they spoke to others about it...
Cichocki played an audio tape in court of a victim wearing a wire for Mentor police. The victim had been leasing Miller a late-model Cadillac, and her credit was suffering because Miller had not been making the payments as promised. “What will happen if I don’t make the payments?” the victim asked Miller. “Your grandson would die,” Miller responded. Many of the victims were elderly. Some were worried for their children in the armed forces or prison. “One victim had diabetes. She told him not to take his medicine. He lost his leg to an amputation,” Cichocki said.According to the news article, Miller was originally charged with 28 counts of aggravated theft. However, all of the counts were merged into one count for the purposes of sentencing. The forfeiture specification means that she will lose property connected to her crimes that had previously been seized by the police.
Miller is also required to pay each of her victims back the money stolen. However, given the age of her victims -- mostly seniors -- and the length of her prison sentence, I imagine that most of her victims won't receive much back in the form of restitution.
The article also noted that Miller's $233,000 house is currently in foreclosure. She spent most of the money stolen from her victims on furniture, furs, vacations, and gambling.