A Canadian-French twin citizen was convicted Friday for his function in perpetrating a 20-year mass mailing fraud that introduced in $175 million. The mailers despatched out had been from purported psychics.
From 1994 to 2014, Patrice Runner despatched tens of millions of letters to American customers, every message claimed to be an individualized be aware despatched by a psychic medium. The correspondence promised recipients the chance to strike it wealthy with the psychic’s assist — in change for a price.
Once a sufferer had paid the price, they acquired much more supposedly customized letters from the psychic, providing extra companies and objects in change for extra charges.
While the letters claimed that the psychic depicted had a private imaginative and prescient concerning the sufferer, the tens of millions of messages had been kind letters, every one practically equivalent to another letter despatched out by conspirators like Runner.
The psychics portrayed within the letters had no function within the scheme, neither sending correspondence nor receiving responses from victims.
Over the course of the 20-year operation, Runner instructed different conspirators who did day-to-day work on the scheme via a Canadian firm. To obscure his personal involvement, Runner used shell firms registered in Canada and Hong Kong, all of the whereas dwelling in overseas international locations: Switzerland, France, the Netherlands, Costa Rica, and Spain.
The decades-long fraud was ultimately busted, and 4 different defendants, Maria Thanos and Philip Lett of Montreal, Sherry Gore of Indiana and Daniel Arnold of Connecticut, beforehand pleaded responsible to conspiracy to commit mail fraud previous to Runner’s conviction.
Runner can be extradited from Spain again to the U.S. in December 2020, and was convicted on 14 counts complete, every carrying a most sentence of 20 years in jail.
Runner was discovered responsible of conspiracy to commit wire and mail fraud, conspiracy to commit cash laundering, eight counts of mail fraud and 4 counts of wire fraud. Runner was discovered not responsible on a further 4 counts of mail fraud.
“For over 20 years, Patrice Runner managed a predatory scheme that targeted older American by mailing personalized letters to millions of victims purporting to be from a world renowned psychic. [The] verdict should have come as no surprise to Runner,” U.S. Postal Inspection Service Philadelphia Division Inspector in Charge Chris Nielsen stated in an announcement.
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