Her commercials were mainly seen during talk shows and soap operas and generated millions for the psychic call in line.
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While persuading viewers to call for psychic readings which were allegedly said to be free, the one-time struggling actress was known to be very intuitive.
Miss Cleo, the late-night TV pitchwoman for psychic services on the telephone, died Tuesday in South Florida.
Harris disappeared following the settlement, although she resurfaced to lend her voice to a character in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, and joined the gay rights movement after coming out as a lesbian.
Harris was actually born in Los Angeles, a fact that came to light after the Federal Trade Commission went after Access Resource Services, or ARS, the company behind the hotline.
She promised free psychic readings, but the callers who called a toll-free 800 number were quickly directed to a 900 number charging $4.99 a minute! The agency said almost 6 million people made such calls and were charged an average of about $60 apiece. In a 2002 settlement with the FTC, the companies agreed to forgive approximately $500 million in customers’ charges, return to customers all uncashed checks and pay an additional $5 million to settle the FTC charges.
Harris returned to the public eye in 2014 when she appeared in the documentary “Hotline”, which looked at the world of telephone psychics, phone sex workers and suicide prevention specialists. “She has touched so many lives, both within her family and in the community”, Cone said in a statement. According to Tony Shaff, she was “as smart as a whip”. “There was so much negativity surrounding psychic hotlines that she wanted to tell her personal story”.
Although she was being paid to do a job, she perfectly understood how some consumers felt (swindled).
He said Harris claimed to have paranormal abilities, but didn’t like to be called a psychic or tarot reader because she felt her powers were much broader than that. In those decades, it wasn’t uncommon for celebrities – including Hulk Hogan and New Kids on the Block – to have call-in numbers, but Miss Cleo’s ads became a cultural phenomenon of their own.
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The commercials made her a star of the Psychic Readers Network.
