The Binge Cases: Denise Didn't Come Home - The Greatest Scam Ever Written | 6. DNA of a Scammer

Episode Date: September 5, 2024

The mastermind behind the Maria Duval scam is revealed. Who is he and how did he operate one of the biggest scams in U.S. history? Investigative reporter Rachel Browne discovers this wasn’t his first mail-order operation and that Terry Polevoy, an amateur scam-buster, had helped expose that scheme. Rachel discovers the mastermind’s M.O.   Unlock all episodes of The Greatest Scam Ever Written, ad-free, right now by subscribing to The Binge. Plus, get binge access to brand new stories dropping on the first of every month thats all episodes, all at once, all ad-free. Just click Subscribe on the top of the Smoke Screen show page on Apple Podcasts or visit GetTheBinge.com to get access wherever you get your podcasts. An ITN Productions & Sony Music Entertainment production. Find out more about The Binge and other podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts and follow us @sonypodcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

As a kid growing up in Chicago, there was one horror movie I was too scared to watch. It was called Candyman. It was about this supernatural killer who would attack his victims if they said his name five times into a bathroom mirror. But did you know that the movie Candyman was partly inspired by an actual murder? I was struck by both how spooky it was, but also how outrageous it was. Listen to Candyman, the true story behind the bathroom mirror murder, wherever you get your podcasts. As a journalist, I spend a good chunk of my days typing.

I'm normally found hunched over my keyboard, at my desk, on my couch, even on my bed. Sometimes I feel like my laptop's an extension of my body, my fingers plugged into the keys like a cyborg. I very rarely write by hand, but there's something about putting pen to paper at this moment in February 2022 that feels right. Essential, even. Because how else do you try to appeal to the ringleader of the Maria Duvall scam? It had to be a physical letter. So I sit down at my desk in my apartment in downtown Toronto, place the white, crisp sheet of paper in front of me,

hunt for a ballpoint pen somewhere on my desk. I try to visualize Patrice. I've seen police photos of him. He's in his 50s with dark hair, dark eyes, and a healthy tan from the Ibithan sun. What drives this man? Is he a hardened criminal? Or perhaps a tortured writer who went too far? And what words do I choose to capture the attention of this master copywriter? I only have one shot at this, so what I say now really matters. I bring a ballpoint pen back to life with a quick scribble and start to write. Dear Mr. Runner, my name is Rachel Brown and I'm a journalist and documentary producer based in Toronto. Standard intro out of the way, I get straight to my pitch. I don't have a rigid formula for persuading sources to speak, but honest empathy always helps. I'm reaching out in hopes that you might be interested in speaking with me about your experience and the circumstances surrounding your court case.

If the goal is to get people in dicey situations to take a chance with you, it's important to be non-judgmental. I'd like to hear more about who you are as a person. Thank you in advance for taking the time to read this letter, and I hope that we can connect soon. All the best, Rachel. These things always feel like a long shot. One month after I send the letter, my cell phone rings. This call is from a federal prison. It seems that my bet that Patrice would respond to a handwritten letter has paid off. I got your letter yesterday evening.

Oh. I was first surprised and then moved by it because it was unexpected. I was intrigued by the fact that it was handwritten and signed Rachel. And so I thought, who's that? I'm Rachel Brown, and this is The Greatest Scam Ever Written, from Sony Music Entertainment and ITN Productions. Episode 6. DNA of a Scammer. The alleged leader of one of the biggest scams in history has just agreed to speak with me from the prison where he awaits trial. It's a scoop, and in the run-up to interviewing Patrice Runner, I'm nervous. What if I somehow slip up and waste this opportunity? I don't know anything about this guy.

What makes him tick? And so I do what any journalist would do in this situation. I read and read and read. In particular, I'm trying to get a sense of where Patrice came from. Because I remember what the British fraud investigator Richard Clark told me. These professional scammers evolve over many years, honing their methods, refining their tactics. But as you might expect from an elusive scammer, it's really difficult to piece together details about his life. One thing I do discover is that he cut his teeth in the heyday of mail-order scams, the 90s. So to better understand Patrice and how he became who he is today,

I'm going to tell you the story of another scam he was involved in back then. Picture a time before smartphones and 5G internet, the story of another scam he was involved in back then. Picture a time before smartphones and 5G internet, a time when the whole family's fighting over one clunky desktop computer at home, and pretty much everyone still communicates through physical mail. In the 90s, the mailbox is a direct route into our homes and our heads.

We are hand delivered information from the outside world and offered the chance to spend money all from the comfort of our couches. This is the era of the catalog. This is sort of something that a millennial generation will never ever understand, but we used to get catalogs in the mail. That's US Postal Inspector Clayton Gerber again. And they had paper order forms. You would

fill it out and you would mail it in and a caging service would get that paper order form and they would type in your order information into an online system for the store so the store could fulfill your order. In the 90s, sending money and handing over personal details to people you'd never met are daily occurrences for many millions of Americans. But this opens up a world of opportunity for scammers, capitalizing on a cascade of data. Our birthdates, hometowns, likes, dislikes, that kind of thing. It's the perfect ecosystem for the Maria Duvall letters to thrive. And this isn't the only mail-order scam that's capturing people's imaginations. The 90s also saw the birth of wildly popular health trends and weight loss fads.

It was the era of the Atkins diet, and Jane Fonda's workout videotapes were flying off the shelves. There's a boom in diet supplements and weight loss pills. By the mid-90s, people are buying these products at such a rate that the U.S. government launches Operation Wasteline, a campaign to inform consumers about misleading weight loss claims. The boom in diet scams also catches the attention of Dr. Terry Polivoy. Remember Terry? He's the Canadian vigilante scam buster.

It turns out that diet scams have been a particular obsession of Terry's long before he turned his attention to the Maria Duvall letters. As a trained medical doctor, these claims for miraculous weight loss solutions hit him hard professionally. And, as it in my practice. So I was drawn into the cult of believing homeopathic skin patches would work. What was the promise of this patch? That you would put the little patch with a drop of this liquid on your wrist. It was according to the acupuncture points. And they would guarantee that this would help you lose your appetite or, you know, lose weight. These were skin patches that claimed to melt away fat when applied on the affected area.

After three whole months of recommending these patches, Terry begins to look at them differently. They're not working. He sees that he's been part of a con. And then I realized that it was nothing but a scam to make money for the people upline and the multi-level marketing organization. This was the start of Terry's anti-quackery crusade against bogus health products targeting consumers in Canada. I was following weight loss fraud

during the beginning of the internet, and I would collect articles. I had like 20 bank boxes full of ads and other correspondence that I've saved over the years. Terry would collect these articles and ads, keep tabs on what was being sold and where, and once he found enough evidence, he'd report it to the police and post about it on one of his many popular blogs for good measure. One day in 1998, Terry's sifting through his mail when something catches his attention. So when I saw this advertisement, I said, oh my God, they're at it again. It was an advertisement for a Svelte patch, a new health miracle that was going to help you, you guessed it, lose weight.

No special diet or exercise routine necessary. Results guaranteed. Just a few years after Terry was fooled by an almost identical scam. This time, Terry takes action. He decides to bring in the authorities. In Canada, we have something called the Competition Bureau. You can complain to the Competition Bureau, and this kind of bureau was like the Federal Trade Commission in the U.S. The Competition Bureau is Canada's marketing watchdog.

It has the powers to investigate deceptive advertising practices. So Terry sits down and writes a letter to the Bureau. It's time these weight loss patches and the companies that sell them get what's coming to them. And his complaint lands with

just the right man. You have to be very creative, work really hard, be organized. It's almost never exactly the way you think. It does take twists and turns. My name is Tom Steen. I worked for the Competition Bureau of Canada for 31 and a half years. Tom retired recently, leaving a celebrated career as an investigator at the Competition Bureau. I was heavily involved in investigations. I started with our cartels branch that investigates price-fixing conspiracies.

And then I joined the branch now referred to as Deceptive Marketing, mostly criminal investigations, telemarketing, deceptive mail. In our meeting, Tom is calm and friendly, a big smile off-increasing his clean-shaven face. He's a meticulous investigator who has overseen a lot of big cases that directly affect consumers across North America.

From holiday scams in Florida to fake lottery schemes in Vancouver, he has dedicated his life to protecting people's pockets. Building cases to the criminal standard beyond a reasonable doubt is really difficult. It's increasingly more difficult, I would say, criminal investigations. It turns out that Terry's complaint about the Svelte patches is just one of many. And this case falls under Tom's authority. We heard of this through complaints dealing with weight loss products, where consumers thought that by purchasing these products, they would lose weight really quickly without much effort, diet or exercise.

And customers are not happy with the results. They have spent their money on these patches rather than lifestyle choices that might actually have helped them. Now they're angry and miserable and have lost valuable time in their efforts to get healthy. So first we had to continue to, you know, interview the complainants and get their stories. Svelte Patch ads begin popping up not just across Canada, but America as well, appearing in at least 43 publications, including Cosmopolitan and the Boston Globe. So we started our investigation.

In order to shutter the Svelte patch business, Tom needs to prove that the patches themselves don't work, that they're promising something they can't really deliver on. So we spoke to Health Canada, had them review the products that involved weight loss, spoke to a doctor, medical doctor, a specialist, an oncologist. To the surprise of absolutely no one, Health Canada confirms that the weight loss patches are bogus. Armed with this information, along with all those complaints, Tom has nearly everything he needs for a search warrant.

There's just one small thing missing. A place to search. So in a search warrant, you not only have to show there's an offense, you have to show the place where you're going to execute the search warrant. How do you know there's records there? Remember, these shell companies are shapeshifters.

Always moving. Evading scrutiny. The whack-a-mole problem. It's hard to know where to strike, and Tom knows he can't hang around for long. You're always thinking the longer you take to execute a search warrant, the greater chances that they might move or something like that. But the team has managed to identify a specific building that they're pretty sure is involved in the scam. Huh. Montreal. Montreal is where InfoGest was based. The business Patrice used to run the Maria Duval scam.

Is this city some sort of paradise for mail fraud? Tom and his agents head to Montreal for a stakeout. We conducted some surveillance there. We could see some of the products. We could see the boxes of that through a window. So that was good. Bingo. Tom has what he needs,

proof that this office in Montreal is currently housing the scam products. The search warrant is approved. It's time to shut this down. We had everything all planned. We were all ready to go. I think we had all our teams in place. We had our electronic search officers.

But then disaster strikes, Canadian style. Then the ice storm hit. So we were delayed two weeks. An ice storm so severe that they're forced to hit pause on the raid. Tom has to sit tight, bide his time, and just hope the bad guys don't

disappear before he can get there. After an agonizing two weeks of waiting for the ice storm to blow over, Tom and 10 officers finally approach the building in Montreal, search warrant in hand. He just hopes to God that the scammers haven't caught wind of the operation and cleared the place out. Always a bit excited and nervous, I'd say is a good way to put it. You don't know if maybe you have the wrong place. Maybe all your information's faulty. Maybe you're not going to find anything. Maybe the guy's going to be extremely difficult and you're going to have

all kinds of problems. So because you never know what's going to happen, right? Tom's team enter the office space and are greeted with several shocked, unsuspecting workers. We explain that we have a warrant. We explain our system, how it's going to work. We don't box search. We just don't pile a bunch of stuff into a box. We look at things really carefully and only take what we probably need. Such a considerate raid, only in Canada. But Tom and his agents are no pushovers. We spread out to make sure that people don't leave

with documents and things like that. And then we just start our search. Tom goes to find the director of the company, the person responsible for the whole operation. Even though this is all decades ago, Tom still distinctly remembers the man in charge of this company. It's a guy in his 30s. He's average height with a fit, wiry build.

His long, dark hair is pulled back into a ponytail. And on this particular day, an angry pout is hidden in his neatly shaven beard. It's Patrice Runner. He wasn't very happy. Of course, nobody is. He was controlled. He wasn't like, you know, he wasn't threatening or anything like that.

He was just kind of dismissive. Tom leaves Patrice with one of his agents and carries on with the search. He goes into Patrice's office, takes a look at the big imposing desk. And that's when he notices something sitting behind the desk, something totally unexpected. So he had a voodoo doll in his office and he had little pins on the voodoo dolls representing all the agencies

that had gone after his company. It was like white piece of paper with the name of the agency. You can't make this stuff up. Patrice has a voodoo doll covered in little pins. There's one pin for each law enforcement agency, with labels attached to them written in careful cursive. Tom is unruffled. I thought it was kind of amusing.

Different, but I thought it was amusing. But some of my colleagues, when they saw it, they kind of didn't like it. I just thought, well, I don't really believe in that stuff, but I guess if you did, you would be concerned. Whether or not you believe in the power of voodoo rituals to cause harm to an enemy, it's certainly an innovative approach to evading law enforcement. That's something I've never seen before. I probably will never see again. I mean, maybe he thinks he doesn't do anything wrong and he thought

everybody's going after him is evil, so I'm going to put them on a voodoo doll. I don't know. So Patrice has been at the top of two giant scams, selling totally different products. It's just like Richard Clarke told me. What people like Patrice are selling is not the point. It's how they do it. And he's clearly a master of this game. What am I walking into with this interview? Patrice pleads guilty off the back of Tom's search.

He can't back up any of the claims that he had used to sell the svelte patches. Even so, he gets off lightly in Tom's eyes. You didn't get a criminal record out of it. It was a company fine that resulted in the case being settled for $500,000 corporate fine. Not an insignificant amount of money in 1998. But Tom puts this into perspective for me. I mean, is there any kind of ballpark range that you remember? Is he making tens of millions off of this? Millions a year? Any ballpark recollections? Probably into the millions a year, I would think, in sales anyways.

So a half a million dollar fine won't hit him where it hurts. Essentially, Patrice gets away with it. It's a moment early in his evolution as a criminal when he could have been stopped. I think of all the victims who came later who could have been saved from harm if only things had turned out just a little differently in this story. I asked Tom what he makes of the fact that Patrice was able to just pay the fine and walk away. The investigators, I guess, see things differently

maybe than the prosecutors. We're more aggressive. We work hard in our files. We really believe in prosecutors. We're more aggressive. We work hard in our files. We really believe in them. We think the cases should go to court, you know, often, or the deal should be more severe, or even if they do go to court, the sentence to be more severe. But, you know, and then the prosecutors have a different role, different tests to apply. Yes, of course, if the law was a bit tougher or, you know, more of these cases were taken to court and tougher sentences and records would be deterrent, I think,

not just to these individuals, but more generally. Investigators like Tom and Clayton are fighting an uphill battle with these fraud cases. Getting a prosecution is not only tough, but it's costly. Like anything, resources are tight. And this is what you end up with. And then you're competing with other crimes, like violent crimes. So it's not easy. What lesson did Patrice learn from this brush with the law as a young man? It's not like he stopped trying to shift product or set up another venture.

Frankly, I think he was emboldened by the lack of real punishment. Investigators came for him and he escaped almost unscathed. He just paid the fine and headed for Europe, a free man. My journey into the 90s and Patrice's early weight loss scam has given me my first insights into his life. I've learned that he's a longtime mail order scammer who's never been arrested. Over three decades, he's managed to stay one step ahead of the law, slowly building on his past successes, slowly ramping up the scale of his ideas. But apart from his blatant disregard for the law, who he is as a man remains a mystery. I want to know what has been motivating him through all these years. Is it just pure greed? Or does he also believe in what he's doing on some level? After all my research, I still don't understand exactly how he's able to persuade so many people to believe in him, in his writing.

It's almost like a dark art to me. And I have to admit that I find it, and him, fascinating. But as we get closer to speaking to each other, I need to remember that he has his own agenda. Now, I would like to have a little bit more about your background. How many investigations of that style? Yes. And also, why did you pick me?

Why me right now? But soon enough, he'll be answering my questions. That's next time on The Greatest Scam Ever Written. Unlock all episodes of Smokescreen The Greatest Scam Ever Written. Add free right now by subscribing to the Binge Podcast channel. Not only will you immediately unlock all episodes of this show, but you'll get binge access to an entire network of other great true crime and investigative podcasts, all ad-free.

Plus, on the first of every month, subscribers get a binge drop of a brand new series. That's all episodes, all at once. Just click subscribe at the top of the Smokescreen show page on Apple Podcasts or visit getthebinge.com to get access wherever you get your podcasts. This episode of The Greatest Scam Ever Written was hosted by me, Rachel Brown. Our assistant sound designer is Sam Cassetta. Our sound designer is Luca Evans. Our mixer is Jay Rothman.

Our assistant producers are Luca Evans and Leo Schick. Our producer is Millie Chu. Our story editor is Dave Anderson. For ITN Productions, our production manager is Emilyie Chu. Our story editor is Dave Anderson. For ITN Productions, our production manager is Emily Jarvis. Our executive producer is Rubina Pabani. For Sony Music Entertainment, our executive producer is Catherine St. Louis.