A woman was recently sentenced to six years in jail for organizing swindles in which an accomplice acted as a "magic" doctor, reports Beijing Evening News.

Wang came across Li Guifang, the group's ringleader, as she pretended to look for a "magic doctor" in a street in Fengtai last April.

Li had just raised Wang's curiosity about the "magic doctor" when Li's daughter, Huang, turned up posing as a pedestrian who happened to overhear them talking and offered to take them both to see the "doctor", Zhong, another cohort of Li's.

Wang was convinced of Zhong's special powers after he accurately described her family, based on information Li and Huang extracted from her as they talked on the way to see Zhong and which they quickly passed on to Zhong before he spoke to Wang.

Eagerly seeking a way to ward off the "evil" that Zhong predicted would come to plague her, Wang withdrew more than 30,000 yuan (US$3,600) from a nearby bank, handed the money over to Zhong and then left without looking back as instructed.

After Wang had taken the 199 steps stipulated and turned round, she saw that the swindlers had fled.

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