A real practitioner will tell you what they cannot do. That is the fastest test I know, and it separates honest practice from fraud more reliably than any credential, review count, or polished website. Someone who names a specific tradition, insists on a reading before taking your money, states plainly which requests they decline, and prices the materials rather than the promise is worth talking to. Someone who guarantees a named person will return by a named date, discovers a curse that only they can lift, and needs payment in gift cards is running a script that has been run on thousands of people before you.

I am Baba Ali. I am a Senegalese spiritual practitioner, trained from childhood by my grandmother in the Serer and Wolof traditions of ancestral love magic, and I have guided more than 5,000 clients across the United States over more than thirty years, with a 95% success rate. I am writing this guide knowing it sounds strange coming from someone who would benefit if you simply hired him. But a meaningful share of the people who reach me have already been through a fraud, arrive with less money and far less trust, and are harder to help because of it. I would rather you had this checklist before your first payment than after it.

Why This Field Attracts Fraud

It helps to understand the shape of the problem before the checklist makes sense. Three things make this space unusually attractive to people with no intention of doing any work at all.

The first is that buyers arrive in distress. Almost nobody searches for a spell caster on a good day. They search after a breakup, a betrayal, a divorce filing, a long stretch of loneliness that finally became unbearable. Distress compresses judgement, and every high-pressure sales script in existence is built to exploit exactly that compression.

The second is that the product is hard to inspect. If a contractor never builds your deck you can see the empty yard. If a practitioner claims to have performed a working, you have no way to observe whether anything happened, and the fraud can always insist that results are still coming. That gap is where the entire industry of fake practitioners lives.

The third is shame. People rarely tell anyone they paid for a love spell, which means they rarely compare notes, rarely report it, and rarely warn the next person. A scam that operates in silence can run the identical script for years. I have had clients describe, almost word for word, the same escalating sequence from three different “practitioners” on three different websites.

Seven Checks Before You Trust Anyone

These are the checks I would want a stranger to run on me. I have put them in the order that filters fastest: the first two eliminate most fraud before you have spent anything.

Red Flags That Should End the Conversation

Some things are not warning signs to weigh against others. They are reasons to stop immediately, and I would say the same if a client described them about me.

Payment demanded in gift cards, wire transfer, or cryptocurrency is the clearest of all. These methods exist in this context for one reason: they cannot be reversed. A legitimate practitioner has no need to insist on an unrecoverable payment method, and no honest explanation for requiring one.

A curse discovered during a free reading, which only that practitioner can remove, for a fee considerably larger than the original one, is a script rather than a diagnosis. I want to be precise here, because interference and residue are real things I do find in readings. The tell is not the finding; it is the structure around it. A genuine reading tells you what is there and what your options are, including doing nothing. A scam tells you that catastrophe is imminent and payment must happen today.

Threats of any kind end the conversation permanently. Some operations tell people that stopping payment will cause the working to rebound, that harm will come to their family, that the spirits will turn against them. This is extortion dressed in spiritual language, and it is worth reporting rather than paying.

Refusal to answer direct questions is the quieter version of the same problem. Ask what tradition, ask what happens if it does not work, ask whether there will be further costs. Watch whether the answers become more specific or start dissolving into abstraction about energy and the universe. Vagueness under direct questioning is doing a job.

The one who says he can do everything has told you the only thing you needed to know. — Senegalese Proverb

What a Legitimate First Contact Actually Looks Like

Because so much of this guide is about what to avoid, it is worth describing the ordinary version so you have something to compare against.

A first conversation should feel closer to an intake appointment than a sales call. The practitioner asks questions: how the relationship began, what actually happened, how long it has been, what you have already tried, what you are hoping for. They ask more than they tell. They may push back gently on parts of your account, not to be difficult but because the gap between what a client believes happened and what actually happened is often where the real obstacle sits.

Somewhere in that conversation they should tell you something you did not want to hear. That the timing is wrong. That the connection is thinner than you thought. That what you are describing is a communication problem rather than a spiritual one. In my own practice I turn away a meaningful share of the requests that reach me, and I say so during the free consultation rather than after taking a payment. A conversation in which everything you say is met with enthusiastic agreement is a conversation with a salesperson.

And at the end you should know three things clearly: what they think is actually happening, what they propose to do about it, and exactly what it will cost. If any of those three is still fuzzy when the call ends, that fuzziness is the answer.

The Escalating-Fee Scam, Step by Step

This is the pattern behind most of the money lost in this field, and it works because each individual step seems small relative to what has already been spent. Recognising the shape of it is usually enough to stop it.

It opens with a low price, often deliberately lower than everyone else, because the first payment is not where the money is. Its job is to convert you from a browser into a client and to create a sense of investment. Then, a week or two in, a complication appears: a block, a curse, an interference, something discovered that nobody could have known about at the start. Clearing it requires a second, larger payment.

If you pay, a third stage follows. The clearing was partially successful, or a stronger version is needed, or an additional protective working must be layered on top. Each request arrives with an explanation that references the previous stage, which makes the sequence feel like progress rather than repetition. And each one leans on the money already spent: stopping now would waste everything, which is precisely the feeling the structure was designed to produce.

The way out is unglamorous. The money already paid is gone whether you continue or not, and continuing does not recover it. Stopping at stage two costs less than stopping at stage five, and stopping at stage five costs less than stopping at stage eight. I have had clients who paid through six escalations before they showed the sequence to a friend who recognised it immediately from the outside.

Questions to Ask Before You Pay Anything

Print these, or keep them open in another tab during the conversation. A practitioner worth trusting will answer all eight without hesitation and without the answers getting vaguer as you go.

1. What tradition were you trained in, and by whom? Expect names and a place, not adjectives.
2. What exactly does the payment cover? Materials, time, or an undefined exchange. Ask for the specific breakdown.
3. Will there be any further costs after this one? Get the answer before the first payment, and in writing if the platform allows it.
4. What happens if it does not work? A refund, a follow-up, nothing at all. Any of those can be honest; evasion cannot.
5. What kinds of requests do you refuse? An empty answer here is disqualifying on its own.
6. How long until the ritual is complete, and how long until results? These should be two different answers. If they are the same answer, the practitioner is not being straight with you.
7. Can I take a few days to decide? Listen to the tone of the reply more than the words.
8. What payment methods do you accept? Insistence on gift cards, wire, or crypto ends the conversation.

Question six deserves particular attention because it catches sophisticated operations that pass the earlier tests. Ritual time and human time are genuinely different, and a practitioner who collapses them into a single promise either does not understand their own tradition or is choosing not to explain it. I go through that distinction in detail in how long love spells actually take.

What “Near Me” Actually Has to Do With It

A great many people begin this search by typing “near me,” on the assumption that someone they can visit in person is safer than someone they cannot. It is an understandable instinct and a poor filter.

A storefront tells you that someone pays rent. It says nothing about training, ethics, or results, and it makes it easier rather than harder for a local operation to coast on convenience and foot traffic. Meanwhile the geographic filter cuts you off from most of the practitioners who could actually help, for a reason that has nothing to do with whether they can help. Energy work in my tradition has never depended on physical proximity, and I have served clients across the entire country for most of my career.

Use the seven checks first and let location be a tie-breaker afterward, if it matters to you at all. I wrote a fuller explanation of this in the guide to evaluating a caster near you or remotely, including what a remote consultation actually looks like in practice.

If You Have Already Been Taken

A meaningful share of the people reading this have already paid someone. If that is you, a few things are worth saying plainly.

Stop sending money immediately, including any payment framed as necessary to undo damage or protect you from consequences. That framing is the final stage of the same script. Then document everything: messages, receipts, screenshots of the website, payment records. If you paid by card or through a platform with buyer protection, contact them promptly, because time limits on disputes are shorter than most people expect. Card payments and platform payments are often recoverable. Gift cards and wire transfers usually are not, which is exactly why they were requested.

You can report the operation to the Federal Trade Commission at reportfraud.ftc.gov and to your state attorney general’s office. Many people skip this out of embarrassment, and that silence is a large part of why the same scripts keep running. Reporting will not usually recover your money, but it does make the pattern visible.

And I want to say the last part directly, because clients arrive carrying it: being defrauded while in genuine distress is not a character failure. These operations are professionally designed, they run on people at their most vulnerable, and they work on intelligent, careful people constantly. The right response is anger at the operation rather than shame at yourself.

Frequently Asked Questions

A Final Word From Baba Ali

The people who reach me after a fraud are harder to help than the people who reach me first, and not because of the money. It is the trust. They arrive braced for another script, unable to tell an honest answer from a practised one, and that guardedness sits in the way of work that depends on honesty from both sides.

So run the checks on whoever you are considering, including me. Ask the eight questions. Notice what happens when you say you need time. A practitioner who has nothing to hide will be glad you asked, and one who reacts badly to being questioned has told you everything you needed to know before you spent a dollar.