There is a formula to this kind of fraud, and it almost never fails the first time it's deployed on the right target. You find someone who is frightened — of illness, of bad luck, of forces they can't explain — and you position yourself as the only person who can stand between them and catastrophe. You charge for protection. Then you charge again. By the time the victim realizes the catastrophe was always you, you're gone.

That, according to Toronto Police Service, is what 29-year-old Gangadhar Babu allegedly did to at least one person in Canada between April 2024 and September 2025. Babu operated under the name "Babu" and ran a business called Indian Psychic and Spiritual Healer. He presented himself as a psychic, fortune teller, and spiritual healer. He allegedly convinced a victim to hand over approximately $800,000 Canadian dollars — a figure that stops being abstract when you consider it likely wasn't a single transaction but a slow, methodical extraction designed to feel rational at every step.

Toronto Police have issued a warrant for Babu's arrest. He is described as an Indian national, and investigators believe he has since fled Canada and returned to India. An Interpol notice is now part of the effort to locate him, which signals that Canadian authorities are treating this as a cross-border matter requiring international cooperation rather than a case that quietly closes when the suspect crosses the ocean.

The mechanics of psychic fraud are well-documented by consumer protection agencies and fraud investigators. The standard playbook involves an initial reading — often low-cost or free — followed by a diagnosis of a curse, negative energy, or spiritual blockage affecting the victim's health, relationships, or finances. The healer then proposes a remedy: a ritual, a cleansing, a protected object, a prayer campaign. Each intervention costs money. Each one reveals a new, deeper problem. The fees escalate. The victim, now emotionally invested in the healer's worldview and frightened of stopping mid-process, keeps paying. This particular alleged scheme, if the police account holds, ran for roughly 17 months and extracted nearly a million dollars from a single individual — a scale that suggests either an extraordinarily protracted manipulation or a victim of significant means, or both.

It is worth being precise about what is confirmed and what is not. Toronto Police Service has issued the warrant and publicly named Babu as the suspect. The $800,000 figure comes from the police's own account of the alleged fraud. The specific details of how that money was extracted — which rituals, which specific threats of supernatural harm, which promises were made — have not been laid out in full in the public record. What is alleged is that Babu exploited fears of supernatural harm to perpetuate the fraud. What is confirmed is that a warrant exists, a victim has come forward, and the suspect has apparently left Canadian jurisdiction.

Canada's Criminal Code addresses fraud over $5,000 as an indictable offence carrying a maximum sentence of 14 years. The country also has specific provisions against pretending to practice witchcraft or fortune-telling for personal gain — a law that dates to an era when such schemes were common enough to warrant their own statute. That these provisions still need to be invoked in 2025 is less a comment on human gullibility than it is on the durability of fear as a tool of financial extraction. Sophisticated financial scams exploit greed; psychic scams exploit dread. Dread is often more powerful.

The international dimension of this case is the part that deserves more attention than it typically gets. Psychic and spiritual healer fraud operations frequently involve suspects who move between jurisdictions — establishing trust and running the scheme in one country while maintaining ties, assets, or family in another. When things go wrong, leaving is easy. Extradition for fraud, depending on bilateral treaties and the willingness of both governments to prioritize the case, can take years or simply not happen. India and Canada maintain diplomatic relations, but the practical machinery of extradition is slow, resource-intensive, and often deprioritized for non-violent financial crimes.

For the victim, the violation here is compounded in a particular way. They were not just defrauded of money — they were targeted through something private and vulnerable: a belief system, a fear, a willingness to seek help in a form outside mainstream institutions. That element of the crime tends to delay reporting, because victims often feel shame about having believed in the first place. The fact that this victim came forward and cooperated with police to the point of a public warrant and an Interpol notice is significant. It is also, realistically, the best chance that anyone in a similar situation ever gets of seeing accountability.