A sorcerer defrauded her of 100,000 pesos and used her son to extort her, but she never reported it

Archive image of a witch cleaning a woman, in Papantla, State of Veracruz.Isaac Esquivel Monroy

He tricked her with a green chile.

After a brief telephone conversation, 30-year-old María (not her real name) came to the clinic with two chili peppers.

"While I passed one of the chiles over my body, he recited spells in a strange language," says María.

Then the sorcerer broke the unused chile.

It contained only air and seeds.

“But when he opened the chili that I put on my body, it started to come out with a kind of pasty liquid, like yogurt.

That's when I fell into his trap."

The witch made a worried face and gave him bad news: Maria was the victim of a black magic spell.

"Do you want me to help you?" the witch said.

"Yes, please," she replied, who had been trying to get her husband back for months and, mysteriously, her hair was falling out.

Then began a story that lasted for months during which María spent up to 100,000 pesos.

When she realized that all this was nothing more than a crude scam and she tried to get away from the sorcerer, the threats began.

The Citizen Council of Mexico City issued a statement two weeks ago in which it launched an alarm at the exponential increase in "esoteric extortions" that have occurred in recent years.

Salvador Chiprés, its director, explains to this newspaper that when this business jumped onto social networks, it attracted a new customer base more prone to being scammed.

Victims fall for the premature guesses of the people on the other end of the line and start paying money and sharing the most intimate details of their lives.

Extortionists use that information to apply pressure when they see that their client no longer wants their services.

When the witch told María that she was cursed, she began to think and remembered the cup of coffee, with a taste that she always thought strange, that her mother-in-law religiously served her every day.

"I told her and of course, she told me yes, that it was surely her, that she wanted me to get away from my husband."

“After talking to me for a while and after I told her about my life, she asked me again: 'Do you want to be cured or not?'

I was desperate, my hair was falling out, I couldn't sleep and at that time I still wanted my husband back.

I told him yes, to ask me what he needed.

She started with 13,000 pesos, which she went to withdraw from the bank that same day.

A witch makes a spiritual cleansing for a woman, in the Sonora market, in Mexico City, on August 3, 2020. CARLOS JASSO (Reuters)

The witch told her that her husband had been tied up, that's why he went with others and behaved violently and ruthlessly with her.

Her son, the sorcerer assured him, had inherited the curse from her, so everything had to be done to cure him.

The process would be long and complex.

Between the money that she and her mother gave her, who followed the process of "healing" her grandson when María was fed up, they came to pay more than 100,000 pesos to that man with a mysterious air, "deep voice" and who made his sessions in a dark-toned office, candles, altars to Santa Muerte and flowers.

“At first he told me that the flowers were left by the people he had helped, and he impressed me a lot because the place was full of them.

Until later, when I was already thinking of leaving him,

He demanded that I go with a bouquet of flowers at the next consultation.

Then I saw the depth of her scam ”, says María months after leaving that hell, that of the witch and that of her husband.

Maria does not want her real name to be known.

Not because she is afraid of her husband or her witch, but because she is ashamed.

"I am sorry that they recognize me, it is a phase of my life that I am not proud of," she told this newspaper in a phone call.

The stigma of the person scammed and abused persecutes her and that, both for her and many other victims, leads her not to report, to remain silent and suffer in silence the abuses of the extortionists.

“Many people do not want to open an investigation folder,” explains Chiprés, “because they do not want their family and friends to find out what has happened.”

This hinders the process, the victims do not betray the witches and they can continue committing crimes in perpetuity, sponsored by the impunity offered by the stigma surrounding this practice.

The classic extortion is carried out thanks to the mooring.

A person arrives with the will to make a mooring to someone they like and the supposed sorcerer, when he has already gained the client's trust and knows the name of the other person, threatens to tell him.

"And since they are very sorry that the other person finds out what they have tried to do, they pay," explains Chiprés.

People come to pay up to 20,000 pesos to bury their history with the witch.

98% of the scams they have registered have been carried out through digital means.

The numbers are not very high (17 reports in 2021, 29 in 2022 and 20 so far in 2023), because almost no one denounces and the Citizen Council of Mexico City is not prepared to serve the entire country.

So much so that 68% of the complaints they receive come from the Valley of Mexico.

Other information:

After two months of going to the clinic once a week, María told the witch that she did not want to return.

So he began with the threats, in text and audio messages and calls that this newspaper has had access to.

"Face the consequences, I no longer waste my time with you," he says in one.

"I have your bank account number, I have all your data, so I can threaten you," he continues in another of the audios.

They also called her from other numbers and repeated over and over again that they were going to contact her husband, and that if she stopped the healing process, her son's life was in danger.

“They told me that my son was still cursed, that if they didn't continue with the treatment he was going to die,” says María, “and that they were going to make us a [fictitious, to attract death] burial.”

It took weeks to put her down.

“Now we are in therapy, me and my son, because what we lived through with the sorcerer and his father was very traumatic,” she says.

Their psychologist has given a coherent explanation for the supposed chain of curses they suffered: her husband is a narcissist in a family that justified all his actions, she lost her hair after leaving him because she suffered from post-traumatic stress, and her son, finally, did not care. nothing happened.

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