State: Pennsylvania · Statute: 18 Pa.C.S. § 7104 · Filed by The Bureau of Real Laws
Every October, Pennsylvania fills up with tarot readers, palmists, and pop-up psychics charging twenty dollars to tell teenagers they will meet someone tall. And every October, most of them are — technically, on paper, in the Crimes Code — committing a crime. This is not a legend the Bureau has to squint at. The statute is sitting in the current Pennsylvania Consolidated Statutes, fully punctuated and entirely serious: fortune telling for money is a misdemeanor of the third degree.
Section 7104 of Title 18 makes it an offense for a person to "pretend for gain or lucre" to tell fortunes or predict the future "by cards, tokens, the inspection of the head or hands of any person, or by the age of anyone, or by consulting the movements of the heavenly bodies." Lucre, for the record, is an old word for money — the statute is so old it insults your paycheck in period vocabulary.
But the General Assembly did not stop at palm reading. The same section criminalizes pretending to work spells, charms, and necromancy; advising anyone to take "love powders or potions"; promising to recover stolen property, locate buried treasure, stop bad luck, put bad luck on a person or animal, win someone's affection, make one person marry another, or induce someone to alter a will. Advertising any of it — "by card, circular, sign, newspaper or other means" — is itself part of the offense, and subsection (b) makes your own advertisement admissible evidence against you. Subsection (c) completes the trap: the customer whose fortune you told is a competent witness for the prosecution. A third-degree misdemeanor in Pennsylvania carries up to a year in jail and a fine of up to $2,500.
Note the verb the legislature chose: pretends. The Commonwealth did not ban fortune telling. It banned pretending to tell fortunes — an anti-fraud statute wearing a pointed hat. The provision's ancestors reach back to an 1861 Pennsylvania law aimed at itinerant frauds, and it now sits, oddly, in Chapter 71, "Sports and Amusements," wedged in among the carnival games.
For most of the twentieth century, § 7104 slept. Reporting around a 2023 incident held that nobody had been prosecuted under it since 1935. Then the law woke up and started making house calls. In 2023, the chief of police in Hanover visited tarot reader Beck Lawrence at their newly opened shop and warned that if complaints came in, he might be compelled to make an arrest under the old statute. No charges followed — but a police chief does not cite a dead law for fun.
Then, in October 2025, Montgomery County prosecutors charged two people in an alleged fortune-telling fraud said to have extracted some $600,000 from victims, and reporting on the case noted that the archaic statute was part of the legal framework — exactly the species of large-scale exploitation the 1861 original was written for. There is a difference, the Bureau concedes, between a storefront tarot reading and a six-figure curse-removal payment plan. The statute, unfortunately for Pennsylvania's psychics, does not care about the difference.
The ban may not outlive the decade. On June 5, 2025, Representatives Scott and Sanchez introduced House Bill 1562, a one-page act whose entire job is to repeal § 7104. It was referred to the House Judiciary Committee — and there, as of this filing, it sits, while the fortune-telling ban itself remains in the published 2025 statutes. Pennsylvania's psychics thus operate in a legal present tense that their own legislature has already voted to consider ending.
The Bureau's verdict: REAL, current, and enforceable — a working statute, not a museum piece. If you read palms for pay in Pennsylvania, do it the way the Commonwealth demands: for free, or very quietly.
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