Identifying a Feng Shui Fraud

A cartoon shows a doctor speaking across his desk to a patient:

Orthodox medicine has no known cure for your condition. Fortunately for you, I'm a quack.

These confidence tricksters emotionally control and psychologically manipulate clients by tapping into their vulnerability and fears.

The manipulation concludes with the client accepting the practitioner's personal judgments and biases about the client's lifestyle. This can take the form of telling people what they should throw out or save (as if a complete stranger would know!), and who they should throw out or keep around. The emotional control and manipulation carefully prepares a client for the final indignity of the confirmation bias.

With the elaborate setup, probably including plenty of references to an indefinable "energy" and various forms of "clutter," the victim is fully prepared to pay the fee for their fleecing. Perhaps they express a little gratitude at being so humiliated. They may be embarrassed that they divulged plenty about their private life to a representative of a business model built on manipulation and utter disregard for personal privacy.

A reasonable person would conclude only an addict or similar individual with low self-esteem would lavish sums on someone willing to provide such abasement.