Second Circuit keeps supernatural Canadian con man behind bars for $175 million mailing scheme
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MANHATTAN (CN) — A federal jury was right to convict Canadian fraudster Patrice Runner, a Second Circuit panel ruled Wednesday, rejecting Runner’s argument that it was his customers’ fault for believing false claims of “magic” from his astrology business.
The appellate court found that federal prosecutors sufficiently proved that Runner’s company, Direct Marketing Concepts, “advertised goods and services it never planned to deliver, and otherwise intentionally lied to trick customers into paying money.”
“No more was needed for the jury to find fraudulent intent,” the three-judge panel ruled in a 30-page order.
Prosecutors say that, for roughly 20 years, Runner sent letters to millions of people impersonating well-known purported psychic Maria Duval. The notes, which promised recipients great wealth and fortune in exchange for a fee, appeared to be personalized with handwritten annotations.
In reality, they had been mass-produced and sent weekly by the tens of thousands.
Recipients also had the opportunity to respond to these mailers to get a psychic reading from Duval. But if they wrote back, they’d also receive dozens of additional mailers advertising supposed supernatural goods — charms that guaranteed purchasers good luck.
“These were all lies,” the court found. “There was no psychic who had read the customers’ letters (or cashed their checks). It was Patrice Runner and his business, Direct Marketing Concepts — the mass-mailing enterprise he had founded in Montreal, Canada — that did all that.”
One letter advertised an ancient statue, which Runner claimed to be from the Thar Desert in India, that would bring “substantial sums of wealth” to its owner in exchange for just $90.
“None of this was true, and the statues that were sent came from China,” the court said.
Another mailer offered recipients a 5-million-year-old “Vibratory Crystal” that promised positive energy and luck in games of chance in exchange for just $45. But the court acknowledged that those came from bulk goods store PartyMart, and were also shipped from China.
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