Information for Victims in Large Cases

The information allege that Patti Kern and Edgar Del Rio conspired to defraud more than $1.5 million from senior citizens using a prize promotion scam. Between May 2011 and February 2018, Kern and others carried-out a direct-mail prize scam targeting seniors. The mailings were made to appear as if they came from sophisticated companies and misled victims to believe they would receive large sums of money, if they paid a relatively small fee, typically $20.00. None of the victims who sent a fee in response to the mailing ever received a large cash prize.

According to the indictment, DAHL owned “Your Magazine Service, Inc.” a fraudulent telemarketing company that operated a call center in Chaska, Minnesota. DAHL devised a scheme to trick mostly elderly customers into signing up for costly magazine subscriptions using false representations and fraudulent sales tactics. From 2009 through 2016, DAHL fraudulently obtained more than $10 million from 13,000 victims across the United States.

On July 5, 2018, a federal grand jury charged one individual in United States v. Adrian Mitan, with money laundering offenses arising from a credit card phishing and brute-force attack scheme, likewise designed to steal money from Americans.  The indictment explains that phishing is an attempt to acquire personal information by masquerading as a trustworthy entity through electronic communications, and brute force is a cryptological trial-and-error methodology used to obtain information such as personal identification numbers for credit cards. Mitan allegedly phished for credit/debit card information of U.S. customers, hacked into the electronic systems of American businesses, and then conducted a brute force attack on their point-of-sale systems for the purpose of stealing the remaining credit/debit card information.  According to the indictment, Mitan then directed American money launderers to create “dummy” credit/debit cards with the stolen information, which were used to extract money from the customers’ accounts.  These fraudulent proceeds were then returned to Mitan in the form of bitcoin.

Mashnoon Ahmed was charged with engaging in a conspiracy to suppress and eliminate competition by fixing and maintaining prices of customized promotional products, including wristbands, lanyards, buttons and temporary tattoos, sold in the United States and elsewhere, from at least as early as May 2014 and continuing until at least June 2016.