The council is urging residents to ignore the letter

The council said it had been alerted about a letter that had been posted to people in the county.

The letter says that something dreadful will happen to the recipient in the near future.

It adds that, by sending money to a clairvoyant, the evil would be averted.

Trading standards manager for Flintshire County Council, Ron Hughes, said: "Receiving this kind of letter can be very distressing for some people and senders of such letters will not be clairvoyants but will be tricksters trying to frighten people into parting with their money."

The council is advising people not to send money and to throw the letter away or forward it to trading standards.

Receiving this kind of letter can be very distressing for some people Ron Hughes

"Unsolicited mail such as this can be largely stopped by registering with the Mailing Preference Service," added the council.

According to the Office of Fair Trading, consumers in the UK lose an estimated �1bn per year to various scams which exploit low-cost mass marketing techniques to target recipients.

The council said many of the scams originated from overseas making detection and prosecution more difficult.

In October, trading standards officers called for householders to be given greater protection against bogus junk mail competitions that demand cash up front.

The scams often start with letters, phone calls or text messages telling the recipient they have won a "prize."

The Trading Standards Institute (TSI) said the prize often did not exist or was nothing like the description.

The TSI wants the scope of the government's Gambling Bill to be extended to protect consumers over prize competitions of this kind.

It believes there should be a legal limit of �1 on how much consumers can be asked to pay in order to claim prizes.