Some kind of magic: Moscow legislator proposes to blacklist ‘phony wizards’

A Moscow city legislator has come up with an idea to create a publicly available blacklist of “phony wizards,” while “legit” warlocks should get together and form a trade union of sorts.

The quite outstanding initiative has been floated by a deputy with the Moscow City Duma, Anton Pavleev.

“A professional association of them [‘mages’] should emerge to tell normal people from fraudsters. It will publish such data on a website, as other communities do,” Paleev told Moskva news agency on Tuesday, citing existing unions of sports enthusiasts and quest-game organizers as examples.

“I believe if there are that many warlocks, mages, wizards and parapsychologists in Moscow, a professional association is needed,” he stressed.

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It remained unclear how exactly the legislator would tell “legit” mages prom “phony” ones to create the association in the first place.

Pavleev’s initiative contains some rational ideas as well, since the legislator suggested that the magical activities should receive some legal evaluation. The wizardry, fortune telling and other quite questionable services are actually quite a large market in Russia, which is, however, hardly regulated.

The deputy, however, believes, that such initiative should come from the “magic” community itself, since the authorities cannot “arbitrarily catch everyone and throw them behind bars.”

The “wizards” themselves, however, seem to be quite reluctant to create a trade union, with some suggesting that the bureaucrats are actually up to their own “magic” tricks.

“I’m against such whitelists, since only fraudster-mages will get on them,” Anastasia, a ‘wizard,’ told Life.ru. “One who pays up, will instantly become a good one.”

Providing “magic services” is a profitable – if questionable – business, mainly preying on desperate people. Back in August, for example, a woman from Moscow Region filed a complaint to law enforcement after she paid a “wizard” the hefty sum of 5.8 million rubles (nearly $90,000) to cure her husband’s cancer. While the man purported to be a “hereditary warlock in the 12th generation,” his “treatment” – unsurprisingly – had no effect.

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