Scam Everlasting? After 25 Years, Debunked Faith Healer Still Preaching Debt Relief

“Hook, Line and Sinker”

Popoff’s style and approach stand out from his fellow televangelists, partly because his writing and speaking style seem so confusing to first-time viewers. He is often repetitive, and many of his sentences don’t make any sense.

“Debt closes churches, and opens people’s [sic] lives to more trouble than they can ever deal with in the natural,” Popoff wrote in a letter I received.

But underneath this seemingly childish language lies sophisticated psychological manipulation, says D.J. Grothe, director of the James Randi Educational Foundation, which continues to keep tabs on Popoff’s activities 25 years after Randi’s exposé ran on national television.

It starts with all that back-and-forth interaction. Popoff didn’t just tell me how to erase my debts; he engaged me in a conversation via the mail, in which I sent him two letters and he responded with two in return. In my case, I received an eraser and a napkin, and was given specific instructions on what to do with them. In the past Popoff has mailed out packets of “Holy Water,” which recipients were told to drink, and he’s also sent “Anointed Oil” with instructions to drizzle it over tallies of their debts.

This whole convoluted process serves two purposes, Grothe says. First, it enables Popoff to identify people naïve or desperate enough to participate. Second, it turns each interaction into a ritual, deepening victims’ psychological attachment to Popoff.

“It’s not passive at all,” says Grothe. “It’s sophisticated psychology designed to find highly bought-in marks, because if you’re communicating back with him, it’s a good bet that you’re already taken hook, line and sinker.”

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Popoff regularly buys late-night air time on BET and other cable channels. The purpose is not to get people calling in immediately with more donations. Rather, the calls Popoff receives from his television programming are converted into more leads for his mailing list, which is his real moneymaker, Anthony says.

All of which makes Poppoff even more nefarious than other TV preachers, according to his longtime critics.

“Most of these guys are fooled by their own theology,” says Anthony, referring to other televangelists he considers scammers, including Joel Osteen and T.D. Jakes. But in the case of Popoff, “He’s fundamentally evil. Because he knows he’s a con man.”

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