A North Carolina jury has convicted a man for a years-long telemarketing scam that cost his victims $4 million.
Rodger Rodger, a Costa Rican national, is the man at the center of the fraud verdict and the orchestrator of a scam that hoodwinked vulnerable individuals across America.
Most of those victims were elderly individuals that Rodger and his co-conspirators tricked into thinking they received official U.S. government correspondence about winning a competition.
The Criminal Division, U.S. Postal Inspection Service (USPIS) Atlanta Division, IRS Criminal Investigation (IRS-CI) Cincinnati Field Office, and the FBI Charlotte Field Office announced that Rodger had been convicted.
Man convicted for years-long competition fraud scheme
The Justice Department report stated that Rodger and his associates contacted these supposed winners and asked them to make several monetary transfers before they could receive the winnings.
Officially stating that Rodger would go about “convincing victims, many of whom were elderly, that they stood to receive a significant financial prize, the co-conspirators told victims that they needed to make a series of up-front payments before collecting their supposed prize, purportedly for items such as taxes, customs duties, and other fees.”
The co-conspirators have not been named in the Justice Department report. Still, it was alleged that they disguised their caller identity using routing technology to appear as though they were contacting victims from Washington, D.C., and other locations in the United States.
Rodger specifically contacted those he scammed from Costa Rica, He used U.S.-based contacts to forward funds to him on foreign soil; the evidence at trial was a reported $4 million from American victims.
The Costa Rican defendant was convicted of one count of conspiracy to commit mail and wire fraud, four counts of wire fraud, one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering, and two counts of international money laundering.
Rodger could face 25 years in prison on each of the conspiracy to commit mail and wire fraud and 20 years in prison for each count of conspiracy to commit money laundering and international money laundering.
Image: Photo by Alex Andrews; Pexels.
