Does Australia Have Psychic Chat Cartels?

In my psychic reading editorial today I'm writing about a serious issue with Australian psychic chat cartels and affiliate relationships that have been taking advantage of consumers in Australia.

Australian premium psychic lines are in a dilemma of their own making. Their owners are coming under greater scrutiny from the ACCC after Telstra was recently fined $10 million in the Australian Supreme Court, after charging customers for 'premium' content they didn't sign up for.

But were there any early warning signs about suspect psychic chat business operations and cartel behaviour amongst 1900 premium owners? Yes.

Australian customers of phone psychic chat, SMS and psychic lines are not adequately protected by consumer laws. It is important to understand the cartel behaviour in this industry, especially when it comes to restricting competition.

Having worked on the first psychic line and coming in contact with some of the owners of the premium 1900 numbers, I am not shocked that they're now under the karmic radar.

1900 Australian Service Providers

In the beginning, the service providers throughout Australia were acting as a middle person offering premium 1900 lines to business owners as agreed upon by the regulatory body. Then service provider owners went into direct competition with the original 1900 line businesses, setting up as overnight psychic chat and adult lines.

I found it amusing to watch a Psychic Chat owner in South Australia, suddenly reinvent her history to become an overnight tarot reader, healer, lightworker etc. because her brother owned a 1900 premium service company. This psychic phone line owner has reinvented her history so many times, even her regular customers aren't able to keep up.

A service provider in Melbourne, located in Hawthorn that I had the misfortune to come into contact with, was owned by several headstrong brothers. In 2007 I was guided to start my own spiritually inspired business and leased out a 1900 number from their company. At the time I was not made to be aware the company was in direct competition with my business until long after I had signed a contract. There was a lot of issues that arose.

This particular Australian media company wasn’t averse to taking advantage of the direct conflict of interest. I was not provided with the regulatory standards to understand what I needed to do to meet certain advertising requirements and it worked in their favor not to provide this information. I couldn't get access to my own data, because they withheld that for their own benefit. In short, they were using their position to dominate the market place.

I declined their suggestion that I should start an SMS psychic text service (because they’re not credible and were invented by info. telcos to make more money). Straight after my decision to decline the offer of these entertainment services, they ended my contract without giving a reason. I was advised by the brothers, they didn't have to give a reason.

A few years later, this same company regularly plagiarised my unique psychic articles, and then fraudulently pretended that I was one of their writers. As a woman I've never been intimidated by these telco service provider cowboys. I hired a lawyer who sorted them out.

In Australia, all of these type of telecommunications service providers were able to convince the telecommunications regulator ACMA that there was no need for any type of regulation and they could self-regulate the premium service industry.

What was TISSC?

The Telephone Information Services Standards Council (TISSC), was the 1900 self regulatory body established by psychic industry owners to regulate themselves.

It was difficult to find information as to exactly who filled the six TISSC councillor positions. If you called as a sole contractor, you were never allowed to speak to a representative. But at least two, possibly more of the councillors were 1900 Service Providers. An unknown number ran big psychic lines in direct competition with the people they were regulating.

This meant that any public complaints about the large psychic lines were likely handled by a regulatory body that was run by people who owned the same psychic lines. It doesn't take much imagination to work out how they used their position on TISCC to their own advantage.

As well as being a conflict of interest, this was also anti-competitive because those psychic line owners running the TISSC regulatory body, could pick and choose who their staff investigated.

It may help explain why smaller psychic lines and independent psychics who leased their 1900 numbers from their larger competitors seemed to be targeted by TISSC in their first weeks after commencing their business.

In my opinion, the self regulation of the 1900 premium services was nothing more than big business psychic owners restricting competition in the market place. In other words, a Cartel that was hiding behind a regulatory framework.

How TISSC Affected Smaller Psychic Lines

The effect on independent psychics came in different forms...

A new independent psychic leasing a 1900 from a service provider was penalised for minor infringements. For example, not including the name of the service provider next to their 1900 number advertising.

Most likely, a new independent psychic wouldn't have been made aware of such obscure regulations, until after being penalised. If you were not on your toes as a independent psychic business owner, you would be none the wiser of their methods.

The first a psychic would know about such minor transgressions is when they received an email from TISSC, advising they had not met the specifications and that their business would be named and shamed online as having had a complaint made against them.

Such a ‘naming and shaming’ complaint from the regulatory body was then easily found by potential customers while searching the internet for a reliable psychic online and could be very damaging for a new small business.

In reality, no customer would ever complain about such an obscure transgression of TISSC rules. That sort of complaint almost certainly came from TISSC representatives themselves, trawling through the website looking for obscure oversights.

This sort of regulatory action was a serious transgression in itself, when you consider the possibility that the staff in TISSC who trawled through your site looking for obscure mistakes, may also have been prompted by business competitors, therefore using the system for their own competitive advantage.

Australian & International Psychics Association

I can remember having a conversation with the late Simon Turnbull from the Australian Psychic Association (also on the TISSC council at the time), about some of the anti-competitive Cartel business behaviour within the industry.

As a woman, whenever I wanted to speak with anybody associated with TISSC etc., it appeared to be dominated by a macho competitive environment that had no respect for women, especially assertive women who were asking too many questions.

Historical Controversy About the Australian Psychics Association

From what I've gathered from Karma Lounge members there were serious issues about the original business set up of the Australian Psychics Association. It appears the late Simon Turnbull and original founders had not arranged the company structure as a registered association that would have to adhere to official association rules as required by the Australian Securities and Investment Commission (ASIC).

The Australian Psychics Association, was an association in name only. The use of the word "association" in the business name belied the fact that it was run as a business and it was not an incorporated association, or run as an association.

The fees collected from Australian psychic "members", did not go into an official government recognised organisation account to be used to represent members. The money went into the company business accounts, with no guarantee it would be used to represent the people paying the fees.

This left a lot of psychics vulnerable, particularly those who thought that paying membership fees to the Australian Psychic Association (Turnbull’s business), would give them official psychic ‘accreditation’ that may help to legally cover them or help with taking out business insurance etc. In reality, it meant nothing more than they were paying money to be a part of a type of an Australian psychic affiliate marketing and media group. This was possibly set up to protect the larger Australian psychic businesses and to give a respectable front.

There wasn’t the representation you might expect from a true association and the only place you could go for help was to TISSC, which was run by large psychic chat competitors.

I can recall there wasn't even a policy to protect consumers from scams, which was one of the reasons I spoke out about Australian consumers not having adequate consumer protections from the Australian Psychics Association. As a respected psychic authority, you would have expected that protection from scams would be one of the first considerations to ensure there was no underhanded behavior occurring within the industry. Once being aware that they weren't an official Association, it makes sense why they couldn't take the moral high ground.

Life Coach Networks Abusing Vet Fee Funding

The structure of the association and ties to American coaching institutes that were positioned in Australia, resulted in every Tom, Dick or Harry being approved as a psychic. Even the Vocational Education Training (VET funding) became a serious issue.

The life coach networks, regularly appearing as psychics on television in Australia have come under great scrutiny. Most of the life coach training organizations in Australia failed to give accurate assessments about what they were teaching. They made millions of dollars teaching students to be psychic. Once the Australian government became aware of the curriculum they pulled the plug.

There was a huge influx of life coaches entering the psychic sector and trying to get their customers to sign up to do life coaching courses. These networks were criticised because they deliberately targeted the long term unemployed to sign up. They made money off the government from the VET fee funding and then hundreds of students attempted to use their qualifications, only to find that the psychic chat industry was saturated and were taken advantage of by the big psychic chat companies.

VOIP - (Voice over Internet Proticol)

3You'd hope the charlatans in the psychic service industry would have been pulled up by the Australian Telecommunications regulators by now, but unfortunately Australian consumers have to cope with psychic chat services that are being set up on Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) telephony.

Recently, I received requests to write about 3rd party providers because readers were getting spam bots being sent to their cell phones trying to entice them to have a psychic reading. This is illegal in Australia, and anyone who operates a psychic chat company are well aware that the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) regulates SMS spam. If you are receiving SMS adverts on your mobile phone, that means the psychic chat company is disregarding Australian advertising and media laws.

How VOIP is being Abused by Psychic Chat Owners and Leaving Australian Consumers Vulnerable

There is now a more serious issue with VoIP psychic chat that Australian consumers need to be aware of. We now have large international psychic chat companies pretending to be located in Australia and actually making VoIP calls from overseas through service providers located in Australia.

They are deliberately misleading Australian consumers by placing advertising on Google Maps and Bing with fake addresses. We have come into contact with a Service Provider located in Sydney that has thousands of complaints from a variety of customers, that should have been shut down by the regulator years ago.

This provider has knowingly used VOIP to redirect calls to India, Singapore, the Philippines, Europe, the United Kingdom, United States to name a few countries. They display an Australian telephone number on their psychic advertising, but the majority of scams that have ripped off thousands of consumers most likely came through VOIP.

Recently Telstra was fined millions of dollars for allowing third party scammers to take advantage of its telecommunications system. Telstra is the major carrier and some of the suspect service providers who have been providing VOIP services for large companies, appear to have allowed criminals and highly suspect multinational psychic chat Cartel owners to use their services without verifying if they were a credible business under the ASIC structure.

One of these global psychic chat companies came to our attention several months ago when it plagarized all of my clients original Australian and global psychic reviews. We attempted to get in contact with the owner to discuss the blatant copyright abuse of my statutory declared psychic reviews, to find a dead end.

On investigation, we found that many smart numbers (1300 numbers) were going overseas. The people who answered the calls for the owners didn't even work for the psychic chat company and couldn't reveal where in the world they were located. It meant that many of the psychic chat Yellow Pages, Google Maps, True Local listings all over Australia were fraudulent.

The voip service provider we contacted in Sydney to get in touch with the owner, deliberately allowed them to mislead Australian buyers. We sent a legal request to remove my original Vine Psychic Reviews off their website. It was a deliberate attempt to confuse my clients seeking out my Australian Psychic Reviews.

This is similar to the hired saboteurs I've been contending with over the years since starting Vine Psychic Line. It is too early to comment whether the same Cartels are responsible for all of the fraudulent reviews, but they're inclined to ignore Australian business laws without any hesitation.

What Can You Do To Stamp Out These Psychic Chat Cartels?

Now it is up to the Australian consumer to report these fraudulent VoIP services to stamp them out and ensure only legitimate Australian psychics can be found. You need to have the right consumer protections in place to stop this abuse. If you are getting spam sent to your phone via VoIP prompting you to book a reading, you can get in touch with ACMA and notify them that international psychic chat companies are sending you spam over VoIP.

If you call a psychic chat company that was advertised on Google sponsored adverts for your State or Country, but the voices appear foreign and they are hesitant to reveal where they are situated, you can contact the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) and report them as a scam.

You do have consumer protections in place to get these scammers out of the country and have any foreign or Australian Service Providers investigated if they're found deliberately misleading Australian buyers.

These psychic chat cartels were initially only operating in their own country, now they are joining forces and doing the same thing internationally to stop credible psychics being found. It has even come to our attention that some of the original Australian psychic websites are now only promoting international affiliates. This is also cartel behavior.


Love and Light
Vine



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