Yes folks. The Psychic Friends Network is back. The company, famous for 1990s infomercials
starring Dionne Warwick, has a new website and listed on the over-the-counter
bulletin board under the symbol PFNI on April 5. At the market close on April
18, its share price was $0.75. Who saw that one coming? (Sorry.)
“We never disappeared. We were just under the radar for a
while,” says Chief Executive Officer Marc Lasky, who has headed the Henderson
(Nev.) company since 2008. He says the prevalence of such technologies as
online chat, FaceTime, mobile text messaging, and social networking has created
an environment in which psychic services can thrive online and on mobile
devices rather than rely on phone lines. “It’s all about timing,” he says.
The Psychic Friends Network, founded in 1990, had about
3,000 psychics at its height and earned about $1 billion through the 1990s,
says Lasky, the 44-year-old son of founder Mike Lasky. The company’s 30-minute
commercials—directed and produced by the younger Lasky—were at one point the
second-highest-grossing infomercial on television after Jane Fonda’s fitness
video infomercial, reported The Baltimore Sun. Then competition, poor
management decisions, and conflicts with phone companies and customers about
over-billing led the company to bankruptcy in 1998. Mike Lasky bought back the
assets for $1.85 million in 1999 and won $4.1 million from MCI in a settlement
in 2004….
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