Poison pen pal
A mail scam that bilked $250 million out of its victims was traced back to a psychic in France
IN a world with threats of criminal hacks like “voicespoofing technology,” where thieves can steal our voices and use them against us, simple mail fraud seems like a relic from a less sophisticated era.
Yet one of the world’s most effective and longest running cons in United States history — a scam that defrauded over $250 million from its victims — was mere junk mail.
The “Maria Duval letters” started hitting mailboxes in the 1980s and continued to take advantage of the sickest and most desperate among us until the government shut down the international operation two years ago.
“It’s almost impossible to find another case of consumer fraud that has touched more people . . . wiping out modest monthly Social Security checks and draining bank accounts,” write Blake Ellis and Melanie Hicken, authors of “A Deal With the Devil” (Atria), out now.
Ellis and Hicken became obsessed with the Maria Duval letters when they started tracking the scam during their day jobs as CNN investigative reporters. They were haunted by two questions: Why was this simple mail scam so effective? And who the hell is Maria Duval?
In her letters, Maria Duval introduced herself as a psychic and promised all manners of miracles from access to quick cash to cures for fatal illnesses. They appeared handwritten (at a cursory glance) with underlines and annotations scrawled in the margins. One read: “There are 3, yes THREE Friday the 13ths in 2009. So, 3 opportunities to win large sums of money!”
The letters hooked its victims with bits of personal information, purchased from data brokers. “You were
born under the sign of Taurus . . . Being born on May 22, 1927 in Kansas City at 12:00,” one read. “I can already see some aspects of your personality. Like everyone, you have some faults.”
If you roll your eyes at such tactics, you’re probably not the target audience. The letters preyed specifically on “people who no longer have the ability to determine fact from fiction. Many of these victims are battling the crippling mental effects of Alzheimer’s or dementia, already struggling to remember the people around them or what they ate for breakfast, just as the letters arrive in their mailbox,” Hicken and Ellis write.
When the letters hooked a mark, their mailbox would be clogged with letters asking for more money — upwards of 30 letters a day. Some lonely victims considered Maria Duval a friend and looked forward to her correspondences. But when people stopped delivering the goods, the letters would grow menacing.
One woman told the Scottish Sunday Mail in 1997: “When I wrote to say I didn’t have that kind of cash, the letters got even more frightening,” she said. “I was so scared I couldn’t eat or sleep, worrying whether I’d be hit by more bad luck.”
Avictim named Doreen Robinson, whom Ellis and Hicken profile in the book, was suffering from Alzheimer’s when she wrote 40 checks totalling $2,000 to Maria Duval.
The most mysterious and tragic story involved a 17-year-old British girl who drowned herself in 1998 after she had been corresponding with Duval. Some of the scam letters were even found on her person when her body was recovered. Her mother blamed the mail-order psychic. “Clare used to be a happy girl but she went downhill after getting involved with all of this.”
The scam was not the work of a fly-by-night operation, the reporters found, but an elaborate international enterprise. The letters originated at a Canadian firm called Infogest Direct Marketing, which sent out 56 million letters between 2006 and 2014.
From there the letters migrated south into the United States to Albany, where they were mailed out in batches — as many as 50,000 a pop. The return address was for yet another location to a company in Long Island called Data Marketining Group Ltd., where workers allegedly processed $500,000 every two weeks in cash and checks sent from vvictims through the mail.
Where did Maria Duval fit ininto this scheme? And who wwas she? Did she even exist?
Eventually the US government’s investigation, which closed the Maria Duval operation in the United States after discovering dumpsters filled with victims’ letters at the Long Island facility, tracked her down.
Maria Duval was a living, breathing woman, a professed career psychic who lived a hermetic life in a small town in the south of France. Her son, who spoke to Ellis and Hicken, insisted that his mother had sold her name over a decade before and had nothing to do with the letters. The Department of Justice didn’t agree. In 2016, the US government traveled to France, searched Maria Duval’s home, confiscated her computer and froze her bank accounts.
But in a stroke of irony, it was unclear if Maria Duval, now 81, knew what was happening to her.
Duval, like so many of her scam’s victims suffered from Alzheimer’s, and, according to her son, didn’t even remember her own name when police questioned her.
It’s a great coda, but not the end. In the wake of the closure of Maria Duval’s scam-letter operation, dozens of others have taken her place, sent out from sites as farflung as Vietnam, Indonesia and Russia. Mailscam opportunities, it seems, are far from over.