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A federal jury in Minneapolis convicted three people of mail and wire fraud for their roles in a decades-long telemarketing scam that targeted 150,000 mostly retired magazine subscribers. The jury returned its verdicts on Monday following a three-week trial.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Minneapolis says this is among the largest telemarketing scams that the Justice Department has prosecuted.
There were more than 60 defendants in this case. Most pleaded guilty, but three decided to go to trial.
Prosecutors alleged that Amondo Antoine Miller, 47, ran a boiler room telemarketing outfit in Denver called Magazine Solutions and also bought and sold subscriber information that his and other companies used to target victims.
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The other two trial defendants are from the Twin Cities. Investigators say Tashena Lavera Crump, 39, was second in command of several similar operations including Readers Club Home Office.
Ballam Hazeakiah Dudley was a telemarketer at Westside Readerz, which had a call center in Fridley. Dudley, 37, wasn’t high ranking, but investigators say they traced 3,400 fraudulent calls to him, including several to undercover agents.
A fourth person scheduled to stand trial — 55-year-old Monica Sharma-Hanssen — allegedly fled to Sweden.
Several of the victims testified at the trial last month. Georgia resident Penny Mashburn said she lost more than $60,000. She was busy caring for her terminally-ill husband and had still been working full time so she didn’t keep a close eye on her bank statements.
A sister discovered dozens of companies with names such as Central Subscription Services and Readers Club Home Office had been siphoning cash from Mashburn’s bank account multiple times each month for years.
Investigators said that managers of the companies bought and sold sales lead lists of magazine subscribers. They had telemarketers pretend that they were calling from the victims’ magazine companies and offered them discounts or promised to cancel existing subscriptions for a lump-sum payment.
In reality, the telemarketing companies had no pre-existing business relationship with the victims, and signed them up for subscriptions they didn’t want, or conned them into handing over credit card information.
Responding to complaints, former Minnesota Attorney General Lori Swanson in 2016 sued a company called Your Magazine Service Inc. and its owner Wayne Dahl of Ramsey, Minn.
In 2018, a federal grand jury indicted Dahl. The 55-year-old ultimately pleaded guilty to mail fraud and helped investigators turn the tables by creating fake sales leads. Scam telemarketers wound up dialing numbers that rang burner phones that undercover postal inspectors answered using false identities.
Defendants Crump and Dudley testified last week that they either didn’t know what they were doing was fraudulent or didn’t know the companies they represented lacked previous business with the victims.
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