Hopkins woman charged with $ 130,000 fraud against 2 victims with promises to lift curses

A woman who runs a mental health reader store in downtown Hopkins was charged with cheating on two of her customers with mental health problems out of tens of thousands of dollars by claiming she could rid them of curses.

Cynthia J. Evans, 26, has been tried in Hennepin District Court on two counts each of financial exploitation of a vulnerable adult and fraud theft. Evans has been charged by subpoena and is due to return to court on December 7th.

Evans declined to answer questions about the charges on Wednesday, but said Psychic Readings, on the second floor of a building on the 800 block of Main Street, is indefinitely closed.

However, according to the charges, she defended her interactions with the two customers.

“I recommend things that help,” the criminal complaint quoted them as saying to the police. “I give them things that help. I give them guidance. … Everyone needs a spiritual life coach. … There should be more people like me.”

Evans added that she compares herself to a doctor who prescribes medication but cannot force patients to take them.

In a statement released Tuesday, Police Sgt. Mike Glassberg said, “This investigation has taken several months … Our goal was to prevent Evans from harassing even more citizens of their money by making false hopes and promises.”

According to the complaint:

Evans cheated on a 30-year-old Hopkins man with mental health and developmental disorders for nearly $ 90,000. She began by providing him with some cheap tarot card readings before telling him he was “cursed at conception” and under a “multigenerational curse”.

She persuaded him to pay her 30 candles at $ 100 each, one for each year of his life. However, there was no evidence that she had acquired the candles, and it was explained to him that she had used them in a secret ceremony that was too dangerous for him.

She later persuaded him to buy a Rolex watch for $ 14,000. Evans told him to give her the watch to “work” with in order to break the curse. Through a lawyer, she finally gave the watch to her victim.

Evans also used one of his credit cards to pay himself $ 10,000 and collected $ 5,000 from him for a crystal he never saw, which she claimed had brought his recently deceased father out of Purgatory and Heaven should get.

Meanwhile, Evans told the man that he would get back ten times what he had given her, for a total of $ 87,886.61 in money or possessions.

The other victim, a 64-year-old Minnetonka woman, had been with a psychiatrist since 2004 because of mental health problems. She reached out to Evans in hopes of attracting a certain person romantically and ended up paying her about $ 40,000.

The woman paid $ 10,000 so Evans could buy a crystal the customer had never seen. Evans also used various tactics on the woman, as she did on her other victimized client, explaining that she was protecting her from bad money.

Evans, aware of the woman’s psychological difficulties, told her, “You have me, you don’t need a therapist,” the complaint said. She also had the woman withdrawn $ 5,428 for life insurance while telling her that death had haunted her all of her life.