Can a former model predict your future? A million Turkish users say yes

Sertaç Taşdelen, a Turkish entrepreneur and creator of the fortune-telling app Faladdin, does his best to resemble Aladdin's genie. When I recently visited his coworking office in downtown Istanbul, Taşdelen was wearing an electric blue jacket, white trousers, and a fluffy button-down shirt, and his bearded, square-jawed face carried the mischievous smile of the fictional jinn. "Faladdin is my alter ego," Taşdelen said of the psychic he plays in the app. "If I quit business today," he whispered, leaning in, "I'd be a gypsy fortune-teller living in a caravan." In Apple's App Store, Faladdin describes itself as "far beyond a fortune telling app." The description states that it can predict one's destiny "by evaluating a person's past." It does this by bringing the Turkish tradition of coffee fortune-telling into the Internet age.