In Part 1, I traced the long history of false prophecy in the church — from Pharaoh’s magicians, through Hananiah and Simon Magus, down to the Kansas City Prophets, Benny Hinn, Todd Bentley, and the present cases of Shawn Bolz, Chris Reed, and Gary Morgan that Mike Winger has investigated in such painful detail. Counterfeit spiritual authority is not new. It just tends to come back wearing fresh clothes.
If you watched Winger’s investigations or read Part 1, the specific methods most often documented in those three cases will already be familiar. Shawn Bolz produced uncanny specifics — birthdays, anniversaries, workplaces, pet names, even street names — that mapped neatly onto publicly visible social media profiles. Chris Reed’s “words” tracked Facebook details so closely that when an investigator altered profile information as a test, the prophecy obediently matched the altered data rather than reality. Gary Morgan’s pre-meeting attendee lists, drawn from public “going” RSVPs on event invitations, were apparently mined for personal details that later came back from the pulpit as supernatural revelation — in at least one reported instance, reflecting a deliberately fabricated profile that had been created as bait. Older figures in the same circles relied on printed church directories, genealogy databases, and casual conversations with host families. Several have apparently used the now well-known “iPhone Note timestamp trick” to manufacture “previously recorded” prophecies after the fact. Those are real, documented practices, and they ground everything that follows. They are also only a small slice of a much wider toolkit.
This second article is here to walk through that wider toolkit. I want fellow Christians to understand how the techniques behind those “ministries” actually work, so they are harder to fall for. Most believers I know have never been shown the inside of the box. The same person who would spot a street-corner shell game in a heartbeat can sit in a meeting, watch a stranger call out a birthday or pet name, and walk away convinced that he has witnessed real supernatural insight — only because no one ever explained the ordinary techniques that produce that same impression every time, in every culture, in every context where someone is trying to seem to know more than he could possibly know.
Magic and cyber security have been long-standing interests of mine, which puts me in a position to share material that doesn’t tend to surface in most Christian discussions of this subject. None of these techniques are exotic. None of them require fraud as their motive — a stage magician performing equivoque is performing exactly the same trick a deceptive minister might perform; the difference is that the magician is honest about it being a trick, while the deceptive minister credits it to God. Most of what follows is taught openly in magic books, in security courses, and in undergraduate psychology classes. The aim here is for you to recognize each category on sight, so that the next time something looks supernatural, you have language for what you may actually be seeing.
Cold Reading
The most foundational of the apparent-mind-reading techniques is called cold reading. It is the production of seemingly personal insight about a subject the reader has never met and knows nothing about, in real time, using only general observation, well-crafted statements, and the subject’s own reactions as feedback.
The cornerstone of cold reading is something psychologists call the Barnum effect, also known as the Forer effect after psychologist Bertram Forer’s 1948 study. Forer gave his students a personality assessment supposedly tailored to each of them individually and asked them to rate its accuracy. The students rated their assessments highly — averaging 4.3 out of 5. The catch was that every student had received the exact same assessment, lifted from a newspaper horoscope column. Statements like “you have a great need for other people to like and admire you” or “at times you have serious doubts as to whether you have made the right decision” feel uncannily personal because they are universally true. They are calibrated to the human condition itself, not to any particular human.
A skilled cold reader strings such statements together with quiet observation — clothing, jewelry, posture, hand wear (or its absence), tan lines, accent, the people sitting nearby, what the subject is or isn’t carrying — watches the subject’s micro-reactions, and adjusts on the fly. Hits get reinforced and built on. Misses get reframed or quietly dropped. A few minutes in, the subject often feels he has had an uncannily personal reading.
In a prophetic meeting the same dynamic produces “words of knowledge” that feel far more specific than they really are. “There’s someone here wrestling with a decision about leaving a job” applies to a meaningful fraction of any room. “I’m sensing somebody dealing with pain in the lower back” will produce a hit somewhere. The handful who match the description experience supernatural specificity. The dozens who don’t never come into view.
Hot Reading
Where cold reading produces apparent insight without prior information, hot reading does the opposite. It acquires real information about a person ahead of time and then presents it as if it had been revealed in the moment.
This is much older than the modern era. Nineteenth-century spirit mediums developed elaborate systems for “reading” sealed billets — folded slips of paper supposedly containing the visitor’s secret questions — by relying on assistants, sleight of hand, and well-placed peeks during the séance. The visitor went home convinced the spirits had answered. The medium had simply seen the writing through perfectly natural means and waited for the right theatrical moment to reveal it.
In a church context the classic hot-reading sources are equally unsophisticated. A printed church directory, with names and street addresses, has been used as the source of “418 Maple Street”–style supernatural shocks. Genealogy software can be mined for grandparents, dates of birth and death, and family lineage, producing prophetic narratives with the texture of revealed family history. Host families with whom a visiting speaker stays during a conference casually mention struggles that later turn up from the pulpit as supposed revelations. Attendee lists are sometimes solicited from local pastors before a conference. An inner circle of assistants spends the time before a service circulating through the meet-and-greet, the parking lot, and the prayer line — gathering fragments of casual conversation and passing them up the chain. By the time the speaker takes the stage, much of the “supernatural” material has already been collected from people who never realized the price of small talk.
These are old, slow methods. The modern equivalent is much faster.
Open Source Intelligence (OSINT)
OSINT stands for open source intelligence — the discipline of collecting actionable information about a person or organization from publicly available sources, using no covert means and no privileged access. It is a legitimate and widely used field. Investigative journalists use OSINT to fact-check stories. Security researchers use it to find vulnerabilities before attackers do. Law enforcement uses it for missing-persons cases. Compliance teams use it to vet vendors. It is, in essence, the art of carefully looking at what is already in plain sight.
The reason it matters here is that the same techniques — entirely legal, entirely public — can be used to reconstruct an astonishingly personal picture of a complete stranger in well under an hour.
Most Christians have not thought carefully about how much of their own lives are publicly visible. A “happy birthday” post from a friend on a public Facebook timeline reveals the exact birthday and approximate year. A wedding photo captioned with a date supplies the anniversary. A photo of “Maverick keeping me company tonight” supplies the pet name. LinkedIn supplies the employer, the job title, the city, often the team and the role history. Check-ins supply the regular coffee shop and the favorite bar. Tagged family photos supply spouse, parents, siblings, and children — often with their own birthdays a click away. The “going” responses to a public church event supply who will be in attendance next Tuesday. The “grew up in” line on a profile supplies the hometown.
Beyond social media there are public records. County property records show home ownership and the precise address. Voter registration data is searchable in many states. Court appearances, marriage and divorce filings, and professional licenses are largely open. Old MySpace, LiveJournal, and Xanga accounts often still exist, occasionally with photos and details the subject has long forgotten about.
Search itself can be weaponized. Advanced Google search operators — sometimes called “Google dorking” in the security trade — let an operator surface documents the subject did not realize were public. A query along the lines of "john smith" filetype:pdf site:churchname.org may pull up internal committee minutes, financial reports, or prayer-chain emails that were accidentally indexed by Google. Queries against breach-disclosure sites can pull old leaked passwords that often reveal pet names, important dates, and other quietly personal details.
Then there is metadata. Every Office document, every PDF, and most photos carry hidden technical information — the author’s name, the original device, sometimes GPS coordinates, sometimes the local file path showing the username and folder structure of the person who created the file. Specialized tools exist that are purpose-built to harvest this kind of data from public documents at scale. They will happily download every PDF a church has ever published to its website, parse the metadata, and produce a tidy list of staff usernames, internal server paths, and other quiet details no one ever intentionally published.
Finally there is pattern of life analysis — a term borrowed from intelligence work that describes the predictable rhythm of a target’s daily existence. Where they get coffee, what time they leave home, which gym they attend, which bar they unwind at after work. A pattern of life is assembled from check-ins, geotagged photos, recurring locations in posts, and the visible social calendars of their friends. Within a few hours of focused OSINT work, a stranger’s weekly routine, social circle, recent stressors, family situation, and probable financial pressures can all be reconstructed.
The relevance to the present subject should be obvious. Any speaker willing to spend an hour with a public Facebook event invitation and a list of those who have RSVP’d “going” can walk into the room already knowing the birthdays, anniversaries, jobs, hometowns, and family struggles of half the audience. Calling out “April 15th” as someone’s birthday is not, in itself, the Holy Spirit at work. It can just as easily be a screenshot of their Facebook profile.
AI as a Force Multiplier
Everything described in the OSINT section above used to take time and at least a little skill. The arrival of capable consumer AI has changed the labor calculus enough to deserve its own category.
Tools like Google’s NotebookLM let a user upload a stack of documents — public profiles, scraped posts, court filings, photos with metadata, sermon transcripts — and then chat with the whole collection as if it were one well-indexed brain. Questions like “what do we know about this person’s family situation,” “what recent events are likely to be on their mind,” or “what recurring emotional themes appear in their posts” return synthesized answers in seconds, with citations back to the source material. What used to require an investigator manually reading and cross-referencing dozens of files now happens conversationally.
The deep research modes now available in most major chatbots — ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity — go further still. Given a target’s name, employer, and city, a deep research agent will autonomously crawl the web for fifteen or thirty minutes, pulling together LinkedIn pages, news mentions, public court records, social media activity, charity affiliations, family tags, and recent posts. The output is a coherent, footnoted dossier of the kind that used to require a paid private investigator and several billable hours. Anyone with a twenty-dollar monthly subscription can produce one. Anyone willing to chain a few prompts together can produce one for an entire list of attendees rather than just a single target.
The practical effect is that the skill ceiling for producing impressive “supernatural” specificity has fallen dramatically. A speaker willing to spend twenty minutes with a public event invitation, a deep-research agent, and NotebookLM can walk into a meeting carrying full personal profiles for the entire audience — recent losses, current stressors, family dynamics, likely emotional vulnerabilities — along with a few suggested “words” the AI has helped draft to land powerfully on each one. None of it requires a single supernatural event. All of it can be presented as such.
Social Engineering
Where OSINT collects what is already public, social engineering creates new sources by getting people to share what they otherwise wouldn’t. The intelligence community calls the broader discipline HUMINT — human intelligence — and over decades has refined it into a recognizable lifecycle. Several of its principles apply with uncomfortable directness to the practices we are discussing.
Pretexting is the construction of a “cover for action” — a believable identity and reason for being where the operator is. A social engineer pursuing a target does not arrive announcing his interest. He arrives with a backstory calibrated to the target’s interests and pitched slightly less impressive than the target’s own status, so the target feels neither threatened nor suspicious and often slips into a mentor-like role. The cover does the work of disarming the target before any extraction begins.
Indirect interaction is the practice of engineering the target into initiating contact rather than approaching them directly. A standard technique is to arrive at a venue the target is known to frequent and stage a phone call about something the operator already knows the target cares about. When the target overhears and chimes in (“Oh, you booked that resort? I just stayed there!”), the target believes he made the first move. The psychological effect of this is large: subjects who initiate contact share substantially more, and trust faster, than subjects who are approached.
Cultivation is the slow transition from acquaintance to trusted advisor, built through mirroring shared interests, apparent vulnerability, and consistent presence at significant moments in the target’s life. By the time the operator wants something specific, he is no longer a stranger asking for it. He is the friend who happens to be there.
Information laundering is the conversion of casually obtained data into something that appears revealed. A detail picked up in a relaxed conversation at the meet-and-greet (“we lost my mom in March”) reappears two hours later from the platform (“I’m seeing a recent loss — a mother, around March, am I picking that up correctly?”) with no acknowledgment of the source. The visitor never realizes her casual remark has been laundered through a spiritual frame and handed back to her as revelation.
None of these techniques are theoretical. They are well-documented professional practices, taught in corporate-espionage training, in penetration-testing courses, and in counterintelligence schools. They also describe with discomforting precision the actual dynamics around several “prophetic” ministries that have been investigated in detail.
Mentalism
Mentalism is the branch of performance magic devoted to the appearance of mind-reading, telepathy, clairvoyance, and prediction. It is sometimes practiced on a stage, but more often in close-up, parlor, and casual settings — a restaurant table, a living room, a brief handshake at the door. That portability is exactly why it matters here. A mentalist does not need a theater. He needs another person.
A few of the most relevant categories are worth knowing by name.
The center tear was systematized by an American mentalist named Theodore Annemann in the 1930s — Annemann was one of the foundational figures in modern mentalism literature, and the techniques he codified in his magazine The Jinx and his book Practical Mental Effects remain in active use today. The center tear is a way of secretly reading what someone has written on a folded slip of paper while appearing to tear it into pieces for disposal. The performer hands the slip back as fragments, or burns it for added drama; the audience watches it destroyed; meanwhile the central portion containing the writing has been palmed and read at the next quiet moment. Newer variations replace the tearing with a clean unfold and read while merely “handling” the paper. In a meeting context, a written prayer request on a notecard can easily become a “word of knowledge” by the end of the service.
The swami gimmick, also called the boon writer, was refined into its modern form by a British magician named Eric Mason. In its simplest version, it is a tiny adhesive piece of pencil lead, fixed to the pad of the performer’s thumb, that lets him write invisibly on a piece of paper held in his hand. With it, “predictions” can be written down live — after the audience has called out their thought. The audience sees a sealed envelope handed off before the meeting; they later open it and find their freely thought-of number written inside. The trick is that the writing actually happened in the few seconds while the performer was “showing them the envelope.” Translated to the prophetic context, this is the sealed word “given before the meeting” that turns out to match exactly what someone shared during it.
What is easy to miss is how dramatically this whole category has been modernized over the past two decades. The classic thumb-lead version is now the entry-level option in a much more sophisticated lineup. Analog impression pads — disguised as ordinary clipboards, notebooks, or prayer-request cards — secretly transfer anything written on the top page to a hidden carbon surface below, where the performer can read it at leisure. Digital impression pads embed a sensor under an apparently ordinary writing surface and capture the strokes as a real-time image. Specialty pens transmit the spectator’s handwriting wirelessly to a hidden receiver. The most recent products use the spectator’s own iPhone: a small “app clip” — a lightweight one-tap installation triggered by tapping an NFC tag or scanning a QR code — runs in place of Apple’s native Notes application and silently transmits everything the user types to the performer’s concealed earpiece or pocket display, then erases itself when the routine ends. The cumulative effect is that almost any apparently natural writing surface can now be turned into a quiet capture device. A prayer-request card filled out before a service no longer needs to be sneaked away and read in private; the clipboard underneath it has already read every stroke.
Equivoque, also called the magician’s choice, was systematized by Max Maven — the stage name of Phil Goldstein, one of the most influential mentalism writers of the late twentieth century — in his 1976 treatise Verbal Control. Equivoque is the art of offering a choice that feels free while structuring the language so that every possible response routes to the same predetermined outcome. Present three objects, ask a spectator to “pick up two,” and reinterpret the result after the fact so that the target object is the “chosen” one. The skill is verbal smoothness. A clumsy practitioner says “we’ll eliminate that one,” which tips the trick. A skilled one shifts the framing so naturally the spectator never notices. In a meeting context, equivoque is the dynamic by which “you chose this person, didn’t you” turns out to be true no matter who was chosen.
Pre-show work is the deliberate gathering of information or commitments before the performance begins, with the intention of presenting that pre-acquired material as if revealed live. Mentalism literature is explicit that pre-show work requires what it calls a cumbersomeness justification — a believable reason the lobby conversation had to take place beforehand. In magic that justification might be “I needed to read your aura privately.” In a meeting it tends to sound like “the Lord told me to introduce myself when you walked in.” The actual exchange of information has happened before the stage moment; the stage moment is the reveal.
None of these techniques require unusual talent or expensive equipment. There are entire shelves of books, decades of trade magazines, in-person conventions, and online courses dedicated to teaching them. Any reader interested enough to spend a focused weekend could perform a passable version of all four within a few hours of study.
Suggestibility and the Body
A separate cluster of mentalism techniques exploits something called the ideomotor response — the well-documented tendency of the body to make small, unconscious movements that match what the mind vividly imagines.
A classic demonstration: hold your hands in front of you, clasped, with index fingers extended and held apart by about an inch. Now vividly imagine that your fingers are powerful magnets being pulled together. Most people, within thirty seconds, see their fingers visibly drift together with no conscious effort. The mind sends faint motor signals based on the imagined image, and the muscles obey. It is a real physical effect with a perfectly mundane neurological explanation.
The mentalist Banachek — stage name of Steven Shaw, who famously fooled academic parapsychology researchers as a teenager in James Randi’s 1979 Project Alpha experiment — has done as much as anyone to codify the use of suggestibility tests in modern mentalism. Two of his principles are particularly relevant here. Homoaction says that a subject who responds successfully to a given suggestion becomes more receptive to that same suggestion when it is offered again. Heteroaction says that a subject who responds successfully to a given suggestion becomes more receptive to different, more difficult suggestions afterward.
Together these explain why so many “prophetic” meetings open with low-stakes warmups — easy affirmations that virtually anyone in the room can claim (“someone here has been going through a hard week at work”). Each apparent hit is not just a win in itself; it conditions the room to receive the next, larger claim with diminished critical resistance. By the time specific details about a specific person are being offered, the audience has been gradually trained to accept them as miraculous.
The same dynamics also explain a great deal of the involuntary physical phenomena often offered as evidence of the Spirit’s presence — the swaying, the falling backward, the lifted arms, the tears that come on cue. Nothing about ideomotor effects requires demonic activity to explain, and nothing about them requires genuine divine activity either. Vividly imagined physical responses, in a high-suggestion environment with a confident voice issuing the suggestions, will produce themselves.
Why None of Us Are Neutral
Even the most polished techniques would fall flat if human beings were neutral evaluators of what they encounter. Scripture has never assumed we are. Jeremiah warns that the heart is deceitful above all things and desperately sick. Paul describes a fallen mind that suppresses truth, exchanges it for a lie, and is willingly given over to its own desires. What modern psychology has done, in catalog form, is map several of the specific ways that suppression and self-deception actually show up in ordinary human thinking. The patterns described below are not exotic discoveries about unusually credulous people. They are normal features of fallen cognition, and they are exactly what make the apparent-supernatural land much harder than it should.
Confirmation bias is the deep human tendency to notice, remember, and weight information that confirms what we already believe, while overlooking or forgetting what contradicts it. Scripture describes the same dynamic in older language — the ear that itches for what it wants to hear, the eye that sees what it wants to see. In a meeting where someone is delivering prophetic words, the dramatic hit is remembered for years and retold endlessly. The dozen failed words from the same meeting are forgotten by the next morning. Over time, a speaker’s reputation is built entirely on a remembered hit rate that has almost no relationship to his actual hit rate.
The need for cognitive closure is the human drive for definite answers and the corresponding discomfort with ambiguity. People going through stress, grief, or crisis show measurably elevated need for closure and are markedly more receptive to a confident voice that offers structure. Scripture has been showing us this for thousands of years. The people of Israel preferred Hananiah’s reassuring lie to Jeremiah’s hard truth precisely because Hananiah’s word gave their tired hearts the certainty they wanted. A speaker who shows up exactly when someone is hurting, carrying apparent specific knowledge of that hurt, is not encountering a neutral skeptic. He is encountering a mind already reaching for the first clear answer offered.
Sequential entrapment is the dynamic by which small commitments build to enormous ones through steps so individually small that no clear refusal point ever presents itself. Proverbs describes the same path repeatedly — the way that seems right to a man whose end is the way to death. Spiritually, this is the slow path from “I want to attend one of these meetings out of curiosity” to “I never miss a service” to “if anyone criticizes the leader, they are operating in a religious spirit.” Every step felt small. The cumulative distance was enormous.
Sunk cost reasoning is the unwillingness to abandon a commitment in proportion to how much has already been invested in it — time, money, social standing, relationships. Long-time members of any high-demand community are often the last to see what newcomers see immediately, because admitting the truth would mean confronting the cost of having missed it for so long. Pride is the older biblical name for the same dynamic. It is far easier to defend a long investment than to repent of one.
None of this should surprise a Christian reader. We are not neutral, we are not omniscient, and the inner sense of this must be real is exactly the inner sense Scripture warns us not to trust on its own. That is precisely why God did not leave us to subjective experience. He gave us His Word — sufficient, public, and testable — as the standard against which every spiritual claim is to be measured.
Why This Catalog Matters
None of what I’ve described requires belief in the supernatural to make it work. That is the point. Anyone with the right interests and a few weeks of focused study can produce experiences that are, to an unprepared audience, indistinguishable from genuine supernatural knowledge.
Scripture has always known this would be the case, and has always given us the response. The test of fulfillment is established in Deuteronomy 18 — if a man speaks in the Lord’s name and the thing does not come to pass, he is not from the Lord. The test of fidelity is established in Deuteronomy 13 — even a sign-worker whose predictions come true is to be rejected if he turns hearts away from the covenant God of Scripture. Paul tells the Corinthians to let two or three prophets speak and the others weigh what is said. John tells the church to test the spirits, because not every spirit is from God. The Bereans are commended not for accepting Paul’s word on his authority, but for searching the Scriptures daily to see whether what he said was true. The biblical pattern is unmistakable. The people of God are not given a calling to feel; they are given a calling to test.
The contrast with the men we have been discussing is instructive. The prophets in Scripture did not curate audiences, build atmosphere, prime the room, or warm up the crowd. They did not need favorable acoustics, dim lighting, soft music, or a buildup. They often preferred to be silent and were drafted to speak against their own will — Moses pleaded inadequacy, Jeremiah complained of pain, Jonah fled. They were as willing to speak in the courts of kings who hated their message as in the assemblies of those who welcomed it. Their content was as often hard as it was hopeful. And the test of their ministry was never the felt power in the room. It was the conformity of their words to the word God had already given, and the eventual fulfillment of what they spoke.
The God who actually speaks does not need techniques. The Word He has given is sufficient, public, and testable by everyone who reads it. The same Spirit who inspired Scripture testifies through it, not through impressions independent of it. When we encounter something that feels supernatural, we don’t have to decide on instinct whether it is. We can ask what we are actually being shown, what the source of the impressive information could be, and whether the experience could be equally well explained by the perfectly ordinary techniques described above. If a single trip through this list could account for everything that happened, then we should be very slow to credit it to the Holy Spirit.
That kind of slowness is not unbelief. It is faithfulness.
Recognition Is Not Enough
If everything cataloged above is true, the obvious question is what we are supposed to do about it. Knowing how counterfeit revelation is produced is not, by itself, the same as knowing how to walk through a contested ministry environment with confidence. A list of techniques is a starting point, not a destination. The Christian who can now recognize equivoque from across a room still needs to know how to evaluate what he encounters week by week — how to weigh the claims he meets, how to test the spirits, and what to do when the methods described in this article turn up in places he had assumed were safe.
Scripture has not left us without an answer. The tests of true prophecy in Deuteronomy, the weighing Paul commanded the Corinthians, the searching the Bereans modeled, the testing John told the church to do — all of it adds up to a coherent biblical posture toward spiritual claims. That posture is what Part 3 will work through. What does the Bible actually teach about discerning the spirits? How does the sufficiency of God’s Word shape the way we evaluate any new claim to revelation? And what practical steps can believers and churches take to recognize the counterfeit and rest in the genuine?
If Part 1 named the deceivers and Part 2 named their methods, Part 3 names our response.