[00:00:19] Bob: That’s awful.
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[00:00:31] Bob: Welcome back to The Perfect Scam.
Im your host, Bob Sullivan.
Sometimes justice takes years, even decades.
She claimed to have even helped track down Bridgitte Bardot’s missing dog.
The scale of the fraud is hard to fathom.
Federal investigators figure roughly 1 in 300 Americans were victims of this scam.
And to talk about how to prevent that from happening now.
And he took pictures inside the, the individual and took pictures inside the house.
But he was writing $40 checks like crazy to Maria Duval.
And that really affected my inspector.
At the time, Clayton had already been chasing after the scam for nearly 10 years.
[00:04:05] Clayton Gerber: That’s true.
I can cause them to happen, prevent them from happening.
And it was a franchise business.
[00:06:50] Clayton Gerber: Well, they’re highly personalized.
These would be printed via mail merge so your name would appear throughout.
These were multipage letters, six or eight or 10 pages long.
They would write back personalized letters around the holidays.
It was a highly personalized relationship or what the victims thought was a highly personalized relationship.
[00:08:23] Clayton Gerber: That’s true, yes.
[00:08:43] Bob: But it wasn’t a personal relationship.
[00:08:51] Clayton Gerber: The ask was always for money.
The ask was always for 20, 30, 40 dollars.
You always got another solicitation.
You always got another letter that was a personalized plea asking for more money.
And there was an escalation of some 60, 70, 80 different letters.
It was a progression.
You paid on letter one, you got letter two.
You paid on letter two, you got letter three.
And it was always an ask for money.
[00:09:29] Clayton Gerber: Well that was always the promise.
We’ll get to that, but she had nothing to do with these letters anyway.
You get enough of them; you believe them to be true.
[00:10:52] Bob: The letters began landing on Clayton Gerber’s desk about 15 years ago.
And he began a years' long effort to stop them.
And we did that and we negotiated a settlement and the individuals agreed to cease operations.
[00:11:46] Clayton Gerber: Correct.
They hired some high-priced lawyers to, to argue with us.
And the same proportion to Canadian victims for this operation.
So that’s essentially, 1 out of every 300 man, woman, and child in America.
You know every–… you see 300 people walking down the street.
One of them was a victim.
Is there another fraud that, that that, that I can compare that to?
I’ve certainly investigated large-scale frauds with tens of thousands of victims.
Well it turns out its operator, Patrice Runner, was an early adopter of research methods.
So they were constantly refining their message.
The letters he sent were intimately personalized beyond anything else victims had seen at the time.
[00:14:32] Clayton Gerber: It was all mail merge technology.
That was how the scheme worked.
You, you needed, the, the scammers needed names of consumers of Americans to mail these to.
You’d mail those 5,000 a second letter.
You needed another million names to get your next 5,000 responses.
And the names would come from mailing lists that you could, you could get from data brokers.
[00:16:09] Bob: And what do we know about Epsilon and who they are?
They wanted to send a well-timed scam to victims.
Epsilon offered a few products available to their customers.
So that was one product they offered.
They’ll be good targets, right?
[00:20:53] Clayton Gerber: Correct.
So then that would be part of the profile they were building about you.
[00:21:46] Bob: So Epsilon couldn’t plead ignorance.
Epsilon knew what it was doing when it was renting these lists to the Maria Duval scam, right?
[00:21:53] Clayton Gerber: They had a compliance program where they reviewed what you were selling.
That’s why the scam worked so well.
And that’s why Patrice Runner lived so well for so long.
It was a court order that ordered the scheme to shut down.
It closed all their bank accounts.
It took us a few years to do that.
So we indicted him.
We understood he was living in, in Ibiza, in Spain, and we submitted an extradition request.
That’s a fairly standard procedure.
His life was very different then.
[00:26:41] Clayton Gerber: It was a challenge.
It was very short notice.
We, we sort of dusted ourselves off and figured out what we were going to do.
There was almost no one who was authorized to travel.
In fact, Spain was not issuing visas to travel to Spain.
They gave us a special use visa for this occasion.
[00:27:18] Bob: Wow.
You had to be a Spanish citizen to, to get there.
[00:27:28] Bob: So you picked him up personally.
[00:27:34] Bob: What did you think when you first laid eyes on him?
You know Mr. Runner was a mild-mannered guy, pretty meek.
And that sort of humbled him a good bit.
And that’s what happened.
He sat in jail for almost three years waiting his trial date.
Most fraudsters think they can talk their way out of it.
[00:28:50] Bob: The wheels of justice turn very slowly during the pandemic.
[00:29:10] Clayton Gerber: He’s still in jail awaiting sentencing.
His sentencing guidelines are high because his loss numbers are high.
The federal guidelines are based on your loss numbers predominantly.
Also targeting vulnerable victims.
Uh he specifically asked for victims over the age of 60, over the age of 70.
That was his target victim pool that he wanted if he could get it.
[00:29:31] Bob: So has justice been done in the Maria Duval case?
[00:29:37] Clayton Gerber: I’d like to think so.
And that pot of money came from an unexpected place.
[00:30:38] Clayton Gerber: It’s really fantastic.
It’s very rare in a criminal investigation that we are able to find the money.
And we, uh, negotiated with Epsilon.
[00:31:29] Clayton Gerber: They are still going out to this day.
And um, so they go out in waves.
[00:31:59] Bob: So there’s a bit of a happy ending.
But it comes with a big warning for the future because Epsilon is hardly alone.
The use of data to fine-tune scams, well that continues.
The more data they sell, the more money that they make.
For the most part, there’s nothing illegal about that.
[00:33:19] Clayton Gerber: Well, I think data brokers are in the business of selling data.
And they will sell data to whomever is willing to buy it.
In the Epsilon example, Epsilon had seen the Maria Duval solicitations.
They insisted on getting copies of the solicitation and reviewing them.
They clearly knew the data that they were selling was going to be used to mail these solicitations out.
And that’s what ultimately made them culpable for their conduct.
So think durable medical equipment.
And that’s a sort of extra revenue stream for those companies to sell their data.
There’s nothing to stop that.
[00:36:40] Clayton Gerber: Exactly right.
He’s Alistair Simmons, who’s part of a group studying the data broker industry at Duke University.
I asked him to clarify just what is a data broker.
A lot of these lists can be about businesses or employees and companies.
So there’s a vast variety of lists that data brokers sell.
I am, too.
I see that you’re Catholic.
I am, too.
I see that you’re a movie fan.
I am, too.
[00:41:33] Alistair Simmons: Exactly.
[00:41:35] Bob: Alistair and his group are researching really sensitive topics.
[00:41:51] Alistair Simmons: It’s definitely true.
[00:42:26] Bob: So let me give a shot to put a fine point on it.
[00:42:38] Alistair Simmons: Exactly.
[00:42:41] Bob: That, that’s just astonishing.
This allowed scammers to wreak havoc on people who had already shown that they were vulnerable.
[00:45:19] Alistair Simmons: Definitely.
[00:46:18] Bob: Alistair is calling for new rules about how data can be bought and sold.
But deciding how to do that isn’t easy.
[00:49:20] Clayton Gerber: Well, that’s a very tough question.
I think that given what I have seen, we need some commonsense regulation.
We need some commonsense guardrails and bumpers.
Now that doesn’t mean that the government regulation can put up perfect guardrails.
One of the things data brokers typically do is they put in seed names in their lists.
And there’s a, there’s a way to do that.
There’s a way that they can do that and have visibility and see what’s going on.
Uh, and it’s not that expensive.
It is not that difficult.
[00:51:19] Clayton Gerber: you could’t escape these data brokers.
The more data they have, the more precision they have about you.
But you’ve got the option to’t eliminate it.
[00:51:58] Bob: So, do what you’ve got the option to within reason.
Limit the data you share with companies.
They still get attention.
Criminals know this and take advantage of it.
[00:52:28] Clayton Gerber: I don’t think email carries the weight that a letter does.
And in fact, I think the email providers recognize that.
Like the email providers already do that meting out for you.
They have this, it’s like a gift that they get.
And I think that people use the mail in the most important times of their life.
They use it to express condolence; they use it to express joy and congratulation.
They use it to announce a wedding or the birth of, of a new member of the family.
You get your legal documents that way.
You get your financial documents that way.
It is weighted to be more important in the way that we use it.
Well, two reports from CNN, Blake Ellis and Melanie Hicken, well they tracked her down.
So it seems some questions may never be answered.
Call the AARP Fraud Watch web link Helpline at 877-908-3360.
Their trained fraud specialists can provide you with free support and guidance on what to do next.
That address again is: theperfectscampodcast@aarp.org.
Be sure to find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
For AARP’s The Perfect Scam, I’m Bob Sullivan.
Federal investigators estimate the scam impacted 1 in 300 Americans and raked in over $200 million.
