These laws leave them open to legal action if they don't provide a series of disclaimers before performing their services.

Motivated by concerns that some spiritualists prey on the vulnerable, inducing or prolonging emotional suffering, Australian sceptics are calling for a similar toughening of legislation here.

Seventy people have contacted Consumer Affairs Victoria over the past year seeking advice or lodging complaints about psychics, clairvoyants and fortune tellers.

Lynne Kelly, Melbourne author of The Skeptics Guide to the Paranormal, says regulating spiritualists is difficult, but the damage they may do, intentionally or unwittingly, can be immense.

"Psychics say they're helping by bringing closure, but often they're keeping the wound open," says Kelly, who practises the faux-psychic art of Tauromancy, pretending to read fortunes from sticks and trinkets, but in fact basing her statements on the way customers respond to her questions.

She cites a recent example of a Hurstbridge woman whose husband had committed suicide. "For two years she paid $80 a week to a medium who claimed to be contacting her husband. Every single thing that happened to her, she took to be some sort of sign from him, and she was unable to have any physical contact in a new relationship."

In the case of the Beaumont children, who disappeared in Adelaide in 1966, Dutch clairvoyant Gerard Croiset famously offered his services to help locate their bodies.

Twenty years after his psychic pronouncements, his followers were still excavating a factory site in Adelaide that he nominated, but still the children's bodies were not found.

Don Spiers, whose daughter Sarah disappeared in Perth in 1996, has also complained about the pain clairvoyants caused. "They have been a huge torment to myself and my family in giving cryptic clues as to where Sarah might be," he told the ABC's Australian Story.

Nicholas Johnson, a Melbourne sceptic who, like Kelly, specialises in imitating psychic powers to show how easily people can be tricked, says psychics should be able to prove they can perform the services they claim — or admit that they're merely offering entertainment.

"If I offered to do a job and charged $100, and then didn't do the job, you'd feel you'd been scammed. What we need is legislation that makes it clear psychics are providing an entertainment, like fortune cookies."