May 2, 2024 • 51 mins
If you have psychic powers, you should see a scam coming a mile away. Not so for Maria Duval. The French psychic only wanted to use her powers for good, but three shady dealers used her name to create one of the world’s longest-running cons. Just because a letter has a coffee stain on it doesn't mean it's real.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Ridiculous Crime is a production of iHeartRadio Zaren.
Speaker 2 (00:03):
Oh yes, career, what's up?
Speaker 3 (00:06):
Listen? You know it's ridiculous.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
Oh yes, oh okay. You know the expression w w
obd wwobd. What would Olivia Benson do? Right? Yes, So
your girl Olivia Benson aka Mariska hargatea.
Speaker 3 (00:26):
On lawn order s su for those which.
Speaker 2 (00:29):
Isn't mean yes. So she was in the in the
park in New York, in a park in New York,
not Central Park, just in a park, and she was
shooting part of the twenty fifth season, the historic twenty
fifth season. Yeah, and this little girl approached her and
asked her for help because she recognized that she was
a cop, and so she literally helped a citizen as
Olivia Benson. And since she was able to help her
(00:51):
find her mother, see, they were in like I guess
Fort Tryon Park trying anyway, So the girl goes over
and she has to, like like Bariska Hartday, has to
halt production and then takes about twenty minutes. But they
helped the child locate her mother, and so she does
like full Olivia Benson and there's like photos of them
like getting together. It's like, oh see, my god. Oh
(01:11):
yeah right, and you're just like, is this real? Yeah,
so there you go, and.
Speaker 3 (01:16):
Uh I am silent screaming in especially heinous right now.
Speaker 2 (01:23):
So there you go.
Speaker 3 (01:24):
Oh my god.
Speaker 2 (01:24):
Yeah, I thought that was a little ridiculous when reality becomes.
Speaker 3 (01:28):
Yeah, well she's she's a very well known for you, captain.
Speaker 2 (01:33):
Oh yeah, but totally. But it's also like, you know,
she's a what nine time Woman of the Year award winner.
Speaker 3 (01:39):
Well, you know I have I have those reading glasses
that we call the Olivia Benson.
Speaker 2 (01:42):
Yes, your cheaters, you're Olivia Benson.
Speaker 3 (01:45):
It's a god bless her.
Speaker 2 (01:47):
What's ridiculous for you, Elizabeth?
Speaker 3 (01:50):
Another thing that's ridiculous using your psychic powers for greed
when you could use them for silliness, Like I was.
(02:18):
This is Ridiculous Crime, a podcast about absurd and outrageous capers, heists,
and cons. It's always ninety nine percent murder free in
one hundred percent ridiculous.
Speaker 2 (02:30):
Saren. Yes, Oh sorry me.
Speaker 3 (02:33):
I thought you were going to give me a like
ooh buddy or whatever You're going to say, Oh, well,
you know I have you damn right.
Speaker 2 (02:39):
I don't know. I'd like to surprise you. So you're like,
I thought you were going to come in hot. No, Okay,
well you damn right.
Speaker 3 (02:45):
Yeah, there it is. You know. I've written a couple
of books, yes, and I got them published. Yes, and
I am slash was working on a new one and
I stepped away from it for a few reasons.
Speaker 2 (02:56):
Yes, why did you?
Speaker 3 (02:57):
I'm totally disillusioned by the publishing industry.
Speaker 2 (02:59):
That's it's a crock.
Speaker 3 (03:01):
I let my agent go a while back, and I
don't feel like hustling another one. Yeah, and I feel
like there's just not a place for me. And publishing
is just so dysfunctional.
Speaker 2 (03:09):
It's pretty wild right now. I hear a lot of
the sad stories.
Speaker 3 (03:12):
I have enough dysfunctional mess I don't need more.
Speaker 2 (03:15):
You don't need that ADJECTI.
Speaker 3 (03:16):
Another reason I stepped away is because the book is
kind of heavy, just physically physically heavy psych I always
ask people starting creative projects if it's something they want
to live in for however long it'll take.
Speaker 2 (03:29):
You've asked me that. Yeah, I appreciate, it's never answered
the question. I consider.
Speaker 3 (03:33):
I think that this one was kind of messing with me,
And so.
Speaker 2 (03:35):
You didn't ask yourself.
Speaker 3 (03:36):
No, I didn't you know? And so I love the idea,
but with the world the way it is and where
I am in my life, I just want to have
fun and laughs.
Speaker 2 (03:43):
Sarin, I get it. I told get it.
Speaker 3 (03:45):
Yeah, and that's what I get to do here. So
you have fun, laugh, dance. You cut the tether on
that way and said, let's totally float baby. So you're
probably thinking cool story, bro or man, this is a Wendy's.
Speaker 2 (03:56):
I have a point. I was actually thinking cool Wendy's, ma'am.
Speaker 3 (04:01):
And I was reading up on this lady. I'm going
to tell you about there are tons of parallels to
a character in my book. It's uncanny, Like you've read
parts of the book.
Speaker 2 (04:11):
Yeah, written chapters, and you'll.
Speaker 3 (04:13):
See you'll see where this all comes together. And like
the whole thing was kind of freaking me out as
I'm reading it, and I'm not sure, Like I looked
up and I am sure that I've never heard of
her before.
Speaker 2 (04:23):
Yeah, process of just the news.
Speaker 3 (04:27):
No, And there are strong elements that tie her story
to part of my book. And I'm wondering is that
a sign? And does this mean I should try finishing
the thing. Does it mean that I'm psychic.
Speaker 2 (04:39):
I think so, because the lady I'm going.
Speaker 3 (04:41):
To tell you about, Maria Duval, is a psychic.
Speaker 2 (04:43):
Oh yes, yeah.
Speaker 3 (04:45):
Is this some sort of cosmic connection.
Speaker 2 (04:47):
We're going to say, a finger reaching out of the ether, Yes, to.
Speaker 3 (04:51):
Tickle me ether. So Maria Duval she was born Maria
Carolina Gamba in nineteen thirty seven in Milan, in Italy.
Speaker 2 (05:00):
That's a place to be born. Yeah, Milan.
Speaker 3 (05:03):
Have ever been. Yeah, it's very Germany.
Speaker 2 (05:08):
Very It feels very much like a financial town, all
the stuff that you think of. Yeah, it's all about
you know. Anyway, I'd like it a lot.
Speaker 3 (05:15):
Yeah, Maria. She got married a bunch of times, and
so Duval was the name of her second husband. She
kind of stuck with that one. So she moved to
France with her family when she was young and according
to her, special powers run in her family of course,
and ever since she was a little girl, she's had
clairvoyant visions and she didn't think that was special. She thought, well,
that's what we all have.
Speaker 2 (05:35):
Yeah, I think the same thing.
Speaker 3 (05:36):
This is what she said on her website quote, in
my family, we have possessed spiritual gifts for generations. The
Golden flex that you see in my eyes form quote
the sign in the Middle Ages, I would have been
burnt at the stake.
Speaker 2 (05:49):
Really, I've never heard golden flex was a sign of
a witch before. I Maybe I just don't get around
in the right well.
Speaker 3 (05:54):
I don't know. Maybe it's a French Italian thing.
Speaker 2 (05:56):
That's a lot of things I don't know.
Speaker 3 (05:57):
So, you know, same more so for me. According to
oh No, So anyway, her uncle, yes, father Camillo Vasally,
He was a priest in Ravenna, small city in northern Italy,
and so according to her Maria, he performed miracles and
the town considered him a saint, a little lesser, lesser
known saint. Yeah. And when he was on his deathbed
(06:19):
in nineteen fifty three, he called Maria to.
Speaker 2 (06:21):
Him and it was there a distance.
Speaker 3 (06:23):
Yeah, He's like, you know, we're like people, what we beat? Maria,
Come here, I'm dying. And so Maria goes like, yeah,
what's up? And he transfers the gift to her. That
was what it sounded like. Oh completely, So he told her,
I know you have the power already because of your eyes,
(06:47):
your eyeball gol. Yeah, and so I'm going to give
you my powers on top of double down, and you
have to use these powers for good, to help and
comfort others.
Speaker 2 (06:56):
You're super powered up.
Speaker 3 (06:58):
Yeah. Then he was like, here have this talisman.
Speaker 2 (07:01):
Like fireball Mario.
Speaker 3 (07:02):
Now, when I was young and reading books and anytime
they'd like present someone with a talisman, I thought that
was the coolest thing ever.
Speaker 2 (07:09):
Oh yeah, completely was like, I want a tal man.
I've waited my whole life for someone like this talisman.
It is very important.
Speaker 3 (07:16):
I'm going to use it on some sort of quest anyway.
Her talisman was a gold pendulum on a chain, and
she would later use it to do stuff like find people.
Speaker 2 (07:25):
Oh okay, so like divining past.
Speaker 3 (07:27):
Yeah, she didn't become a professional psychic right away.
Speaker 2 (07:30):
She wore a hypnotist with the pendula. Yeah, like he
was looking into my eyes.
Speaker 3 (07:37):
For a while, So she's not a psychic off the bat.
She worked as a scout at a couple of art
galleries in Paris.
Speaker 2 (07:43):
Was an art scout.
Speaker 3 (07:44):
Yeah, okay, like a cub scout, but an art scout.
Speaker 2 (07:47):
She wore the outfit shelpist.
Speaker 3 (07:49):
She would gather badges, she looks for lost artists. Sometimes
she'd help artists find new stronger names. More in line
with the Kabbalah that would bring them a better chance
at success. Okay, I don't know what that means. She
worked at a large bank, Like your.
Speaker 2 (08:06):
Name is Pablo Fancy and how about Picasso.
Speaker 3 (08:09):
Exactly, So she's worked. She worked at a bank, not
as a teller, but she helped narrow down candidates for
executive positions using quote, graphological, morphological, and astrological texts.
Speaker 2 (08:23):
So she looks at their handwriting, looks at their face,
and then she looks.
Speaker 3 (08:26):
At the resumes, and she's like good bad good good bad,
like puts them into piles. She also said that she
worked with many other heads of industry, helping them set
up their companies. And she said that she can't make
problems disappear, but she can identify them and like point
people that you know what's wrong.
Speaker 2 (08:44):
Your foot's broken, exactly, Doc.
Speaker 3 (08:47):
That's in the corporate world. It's a huge problem, broken foot.
So she'd also help businesses set dates to make important
decisions or like for movies to premiere. So this is
like we're getting in Nancy Reagan territory.
Speaker 2 (09:00):
They're like, give me a special date.
Speaker 3 (09:01):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (09:02):
At history different figure out why the thing had happened on.
Speaker 3 (09:05):
Is how she explains right or the times of such.
She said, people are really surprised when you have to
time a film release to coincide with the full moon,
because when there's a full moon, people are much more
likely to go out than during other lunar phases.
Speaker 2 (09:20):
Of course, they can see more at night, especure heart attacks. Whatever.
Speaker 3 (09:24):
She wasn't just doing this. She had another job as
a She owned a pool and sauna cleaning business. You know,
it's adjacent.
Speaker 2 (09:34):
She's not actually cleaning the sauna's issue.
Speaker 3 (09:36):
I think she probably hired.
Speaker 2 (09:38):
She had like a bunch of like boys and like
cut off shorts clean but still she's like.
Speaker 3 (09:44):
We will only clean under you know, mercury.
Speaker 2 (09:47):
But she gets a call, she's like, oh, I gotta
go divine the mood.
Speaker 3 (09:52):
She owned clothing stores in the south of France, in
and around the town of Callous, and she like Maria Callis. Yes,
it was at one of the stores that she started
giving psychic readings, where she's like, Okay, I'm not just
going to manipulate industry.
Speaker 2 (10:06):
I'm a personal person.
Speaker 3 (10:08):
I'm going to manipulate people. And she started getting attention
just locally at first, for seven years she worked at
three different radio stations doing astrological charts for listeners. Yes,
she's like, call her here on the air.
Speaker 2 (10:21):
I always going to be a ventriloquist on the radio.
That was the whole thing. There were a lot of
ventriloquists on the radio, like how great is that?
Speaker 3 (10:29):
It's just like two people exactly, but it's.
Speaker 2 (10:31):
Like the whole thing and you're now matching someone having
the puppet.
Speaker 3 (10:34):
There astrologery like the magic of radio.
Speaker 2 (10:37):
Yeah, but then astrologers like the same thing. They're like,
you know, they're just sitting there and like their pajamas,
but they're actually like before the crystal ball. Yeah, they
don't have to do it, don't have to pay for
smoke bombs.
Speaker 4 (10:48):
No.
Speaker 3 (10:49):
And so she also she had a segment on French
TV called Bibi Bonu where she'd give horoscopes to babies
on their first birthdays.
Speaker 2 (11:00):
She's about to say it, Wait a minute.
Speaker 3 (11:03):
She's a little bit of this, a little bit of this.
By the seventies, she was showing up in the paper
and nice for her psychic work.
Speaker 2 (11:12):
She was she was in French vogue.
Speaker 3 (11:15):
OK. So she said at first she didn't want to
change people. She just wanted to help people. But eventually
she became a professional. So she studied for ten years
at an esoteric school and she ten years, yeah, ten years,
and she joined quoting various movements, including Druidic movements.
Speaker 2 (11:37):
Okay, yeah, but.
Speaker 3 (11:38):
That didn't work out because she don't like the robes. No,
she was like, I'm Italian and so I'm more inclined
towards Greco Latin modalities. Oh of course, She's like, it's
too white for me.
Speaker 2 (11:50):
And so much walking in a circle got a chanting.
I like, more like laying about in smoke exactly, more
fruit involved in my ceremonies.
Speaker 3 (11:57):
So she said. She later established the French Institute for
Parapsychological Research to foster that, and she was also the president,
also a member, also a member, and it was sometimes
called the Callous Parapsychology Institute. Okay, there's this book called
A Deal with the Devil about Maria Tufall, and it
came out in twenty eighteen and in it, authors Blake
(12:17):
Ellis and Melanie Hicken, they write, quote, she claims that
she has provided guidance to Hollywood stars who pay seven
hundred dollars for a session, and several American presidents and
many other political leaders. In fact, she says many of
the world's richest and most famous celebrities never make a
decision without consulting her first, and that she is the
only psychic ever to have been granted an audience with
(12:39):
the Pope.
Speaker 2 (12:40):
Okay, you know, like if you're on social media right, like,
and you follow some of the people I follow, you're
going to get things of like yo, I got like, okay,
my people are sitting now they're going they're doing a
humiliation ritual on this side the celebrity. Right, It'll be like,
you know, some young black celebrity has to be humiliated,
so now they can join the illuminati. Oh right, I've
seen claims and I'm like, come on, now, you really
(13:01):
come on people. But at the same time, then you
go on this side. When we were investigating, it's always
like the President came to me, I met with the Pope,
and I'm like, okay, So a lot of people believe
in these occult things, so like, oh yeah, I think
that some of these people when they come out there
with the it's a humiliation ritual and see where they're trying.
I'm like some of them have to be right, and
just the numbers exactly. I'm not saying which ones, but
(13:23):
because of how much we're hearing from the other end
of the well, presidents came here and decided when should
I start the war?
Speaker 3 (13:29):
Exactly exactly, So a humiliation ritual for a.
Speaker 2 (13:32):
Young to join the illuminati or whatever. I'm not necessarily backing,
but one.
Speaker 3 (13:37):
With the pope. CNN did an investigation into her with
these authors, and they later revealed that, according to a friend,
Maria had technically met with the Pope and shook his hand,
but she was like part of a crowd. Oh so,
and there was not like a personal audience.
Speaker 2 (13:52):
Ah yeah, so met the pope. I read the same
as the Pope.
Speaker 3 (13:56):
Yeah, exactly. She shook his hand, she reached out over
a bunch of other people high five during So about
that talisman and the missing person and.
Speaker 2 (14:07):
The missing you were wondering, I just checked my notes.
Speaker 3 (14:09):
Thank you for asking.
Speaker 2 (14:10):
You haven't circled back.
Speaker 3 (14:12):
I'm about to circle back.
Speaker 2 (14:13):
Put a pin in it.
Speaker 3 (14:14):
There are a lot of variations on this story, but
here suggest around nineteen seventy seven, the wife of a
young dentist disappeared. It is not important to know that
he was a dentist. Yeah, but this is this is
in the south of France. She took off her car
on like a Tuesday afternoon and no one had seen
her after that, and then hikers found her car the
(14:36):
next morning abandoned. She was nowhere to be found. And
this is pre cell phone, mind you, so they couldn't
try and call or like look for her.
Speaker 2 (14:44):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (14:45):
The authorities sent out search parties, two helicopters, the fire
brigade end quote the best police dog in the region,
called Droll four. Researcher Marissa pointed out that no information
is available about the presumed police dogs Droll one, two
and three where they also amazing was one a bad apple?
(15:08):
Where was there a mister or missus droll? Keep in
mind that in French droll means funny. It can also
mean odd in some idioms, so like is it's a
funny old word or present I had I have an
odd premonition and I'm probably not saying those right, and
(15:29):
that's maybe a little I'm understanding them. You've got it
because I translated the language work. It's the language of ridiculousness.
So who was droll for a weird little When you
Google image search droll for dog, you get lots of
weird AI cat pictures and then they're like leggings with
cats printed in the eyes are on the crotch. I
(15:50):
don't know, just do it image search for ivy for
dog and then you get all this weird Anyway, Maria
she saw the story about the missing woman in the
paper and she offered to help. And she asked for
the woman's date of birth, a recent photo, and a
map of the area. And she put the photo on
the map and then held the gold pendulum over the map,
(16:13):
and the pendulum it starts to swing as they do,
and it starts to spin over a certain region, and
the cops they're skeptical, this kind of seems like a
waste of time and hokum at that. So they called
back the rescue helicopter. They're like, you know what, we
give up.
Speaker 2 (16:28):
It's a pendulum that's sending you out there.
Speaker 3 (16:30):
And they're like, maybe she disappeared on purpose and taken
herself out of the game, so to speak. So the husband, though,
is like, no more helicopter, helicopter, and so he hires
a private helicopter and says search over where the pendulum
was spinning, and so he believed in her. He knew
his wife was still out there waiting to be found.
Speaker 2 (16:48):
And she was what.
Speaker 3 (16:50):
She was, hurt and unconscious. She hadn't eaten or had
anything to drink or even move for three days and
nights and she was discovered and Marie, I said, the
pendulum worked because quote, everything in the universe vibrates and
sends out different waves. To find something or someone that
has gone missing, the vibrations which hold a connection with
the subject or the person must be investigated and determined.
(17:14):
That is what I did with the help of the
star sign and the photo of the woman. Then I
simply gave the information to my hanging lamp and asked
for the source of these vibrations to be pointed out
on the map.
Speaker 2 (17:23):
You know, it's easy to the CIA. I have it.
They have a whole program that is taken from the
one guy's other program. He's like around to hear anyway,
the CIA, they have a whole thing. I've been reading
a bunch about how to psychically trained according to the CIA,
and is all this exact same stuff. Let's do it.
Speaker 3 (17:38):
Let's start us. Let's do a seminar.
Speaker 2 (17:39):
Okay, okay, I'm down.
Speaker 3 (17:41):
So we'll host a seminar and we don't know how
to do it. Oh we're gonna host you yeah, yea, yeah,
we're okay. No, no, no, We're going to put on so
much easier. I know it'll be a ridiculous grind. So
the story of this incredible vibration went viral by seventy
standards all over France. People heard about it and they
felt that Maria was the real deal, like a psychic hero.
(18:03):
It said that in total she helped find nineteen people
over the years. Yeah, and plus some cats and a donkey,
the missing donkey. Oh and she said she found Brigitte
Bardeau's missing dog. Okay, And the only problem is that
Bardew later told CNN that her dog was found dead
drowned in a pool and that Duval had nothing to
do with any of it, which is a bummer detail.
Speaker 2 (18:24):
Wait, so she lied about finding Bridget Bardew's dog. When
someone went to question that, Bridget Bardow is like, well,
if I got a story for you, Oh yeah, no,
she had nothing.
Speaker 3 (18:32):
But this is horrible and I'm an animal lover and
somehow I let my dog drown Wow. So Maria said
that she was involved in quote, one of the biggest
criminal cases the world has ever known. Let's take a break.
When we come back, I'll tell you about the biggest
criminal case the world has ever known.
Speaker 2 (19:09):
Zaren yo. Hey, so we were talking about Maria Duval.
I was thinking about bridge Bordo's dog.
Speaker 3 (19:13):
But there's that too. Let's give a moment of yeah. Okay,
we gave him over the rainbow. Yeah, the rambow bridge.
All right, So Maria Duval she said that she was
involved in one of the biggest criminal cases the world
has ever known. Yes, that's the Raoul Vallenberg case.
Speaker 2 (19:28):
Oh wait a minute, Raoul Wallenberg. Uh huh okay Vallenburg sure, yes,
I'm saying it wrong.
Speaker 3 (19:33):
Swedish architect, Yes, and a diplomat who saved thousands of
Jews in German occupied Hungary during the Holocaust.
Speaker 2 (19:40):
How is she involved, Well, let's give me.
Speaker 3 (19:42):
Let me tell you a little bit more about him.
He was Sweden's Special envoy in Budapest between July and
December of nineteen forty four, and in that time he
issued protective passports sheltered Jews and buildings, which he declared
Swedish territory. So January seventeenth, nineteen forty five, during the
siege of Budapest by the Red arm Me agents captured
Vollenberg and accused him of espionage, and then he disappeared.
(20:06):
Nineteen fifty seven, twelve years after he went missing, Soviet
authorities said he died of a heart attack two years
after he had been last seen, and that he'd been
locked up in Lubyanka, the secret police's prison in Moscow.
Speaker 2 (20:19):
He died of weak art.
Speaker 3 (20:20):
Yeah, he's so sad. The family didn't believe this.
Speaker 2 (20:23):
Yes, no, really, and there.
Speaker 3 (20:24):
Had been reports and whisperings that Vallenberg had been seen
in Soviet prisons and mental institutions in subsequent years. So
they reached out to Maria and they asked if he
was still in the Russian prison or maybe had he escaped.
She was like, let me think on it. She gets
the pendulum. She's like, he had a heart attack, he died.
When they said he did, she said that he had
(20:47):
it because he'd been tortured. So she adds in a
little bit of extra juice. Sorry, And during her consultations
for this and others, she generally used tarot cards.
Speaker 2 (20:57):
She does, like remote viewing via tarot card I.
Speaker 3 (20:59):
Think, so, yeah, there's a lot of stuff she doesn't like.
Other things she'd do, she'd ask people to hit a
bell three times, you know, shuttles and then splash inc
thirteen times, of course, and then she'd interpret the answers
out of that, and so like, if she was having
a really hard time with a vision, she'd use a
(21:20):
crystal ball, And apparently those are really hard work and
they take a lot of concentration, so she wasn't into that.
So you know, she's established herself. She had this personal secretary,
Francois bar and Francoise later became the mayor of the
small French town that Maria lived in, Callous, and she
(21:41):
vouched for Maria's abilities. She said she'd seen it all
in action. She said that there was a motorcyclist who'd
been in an accident and couldn't walk very well, and
that Maria apparently used her power of radiothesia, which is
sensitiveness held to enable a person with the aid of
a divining rod or pendulum to detect things. You know
who said that Webster's Dictionary, oh defines radiothesia, so basically
(22:05):
divining rods. So she used that on the motorcycle boy.
Speaker 2 (22:09):
Feeling through the form of radiant.
Speaker 3 (22:11):
Yeah, like she's just like she's holding like two sticks.
She spent an hour with the guy just swinging the
old pendulum over him. When she was done, he walked
away normally amazing, incredible, that a miracle, some would Barr
also said there was another woman who would always call
(22:33):
Maria asking for good lotto numbers, and that woman was
not me. Uh So Maria would tell her to be
careful with her money and take out a low interest
loan to pay off her debt, which is more debt
to pay off debt. But okay, sure that doesn't make
sense to be anyway. I guess consolidate her debt is
what she's saying.
Speaker 2 (22:49):
I'm the one to talk about.
Speaker 3 (22:50):
Woman didn't want to hear all that. Yeah, and she
wanted the lotto numbers. She's like, that's great and all.
Speaker 2 (22:55):
But what of the lives? What's the winning numbers?
Speaker 3 (22:57):
And she she kept calling and Maria just started ignoring her.
Keep calling me alone, Becky. And so she said people
who wanted an instant fixed were just a waste of
her time.
Speaker 2 (23:08):
She wanted nothing to do with them.
Speaker 3 (23:09):
People asked her to predict their deaths, and that was
apparently something she could do. Yeah, but no, you thought
about it, No do you?
Speaker 2 (23:21):
I don't. It turns on the day you ask me.
Speaker 3 (23:23):
Yeah, I don't want to know.
Speaker 2 (23:25):
Because I don't mind knowing something. But some days I'd
be like, oh, I don't want to know. Other days
I'd be like, oh, definitely, I may relieve the pressure.
Speaker 3 (23:31):
I feel like. It's also for the like I don't
want like a ring camera at my front door.
Speaker 2 (23:35):
Yeah, that's a little different.
Speaker 3 (23:37):
Okay, because like around here, if someone brings into your house,
you can give the cops the footage. It doesn't do anything.
Speaker 2 (23:42):
That doesn't mean anything. But if a psychic tells you
doesn't necessarily.
Speaker 3 (23:45):
But it's also like, but if I saw someone prowling
around my yard but nothing happened, I don't want to know.
I rather live in bliss.
Speaker 2 (23:51):
You like that the bliss. I'm full of bliss there.
Speaker 3 (23:55):
So she would never she would never do that tell
people she knew, Yeah, she would, she would never tell
anyone the answer. She did do a couple exorcisms, but
only a few of them because, like she said, they
were super super difficult, and it was a very special thing.
Speaker 2 (24:09):
You also have to worry about that the imagine taking
on some dark alga.
Speaker 3 (24:12):
She said. One of them left burn marks on her knees,
but there was no fire.
Speaker 2 (24:16):
Just from the friction of like praying so hard, Saren.
Speaker 3 (24:18):
It was really spooky. Neighbors, Oh, was that what you
were doing?
Speaker 2 (24:24):
Maria? So uh, I'm not going to say.
Speaker 3 (24:28):
Sometime in the mid eighties she sold her name. But
what you mean, It's like around nineteen eighty five a
trademark for the commercial use of the name Maria Duval
was issued in France.
Speaker 2 (24:39):
She passed it on like Gallagher.
Speaker 3 (24:40):
Yeah, and it's like Menudo. It's unclear or unknown if
Maria took this out herself or if it was because
of her early dealings with the businessmen who would later
run her empire. And later there were other similar trademarks
taken out all over the world. So who are those businessmen?
Speaker 2 (24:58):
Who are those businessmen?
Speaker 3 (24:59):
Thank you for asking? Jacques Mail and Jean Claude Reel
for real, And so they reached out to her about
using her name for a mailing campaign for their business.
And you know, she's super well known as a psychic
in France, Yeah, market her powers, and according to her
(25:20):
son Antoine, she was dazzled by these guys and the offer,
and she didn't really read the contract. She was like, perfect,
I'll do it. And she said, you know, for the
first decade that we worked together, things were fine.
Speaker 2 (25:32):
That's good in business, ten years.
Speaker 3 (25:33):
Ten years, but greed always rears its ugly head, and
that's when things got bad. At first, the business only
sold astrology charts, but later their business model changed to letters,
and so the contract was structured in a way that
she couldn't get out of it. So she's really the
con men's first victim. As part of her contract, she
(25:54):
had to do press and touring, and this was so
people could see that she was a real person, and
it took her all over Europe and beyond and beyond.
In two thousand and eight, she spoke in Moscow at
the Central House of Journalists where she forecasted the future
of Russia. And apparently as part of this, seven hundred
(26:15):
thousand apple trees were planted near Moscow and all named
Maria duval I. Have no idea why or what.
Speaker 2 (26:24):
That means, what it, what does.
Speaker 3 (26:26):
It have to do with it? That's a lot of trees.
That's a lot of apple apples.
Speaker 2 (26:33):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (26:34):
So anyway, Maria Duvall letters, as you can probably guess,
they evolved into a scam.
Speaker 2 (26:41):
Yeah, I'm guessing.
Speaker 3 (26:43):
The letter scam is considered one of the world's longest
running cons. Her letter scam in particular is considered one
of the longest running cons in the whole wide world.
It's taken place all over this this beautiful globe, including US, Canada, Denmark,
and Russia, Norway, New Zealand, Finland, Japan, Australia. I could
go on.
Speaker 2 (27:04):
Worldwide sattle down.
Speaker 3 (27:06):
In the beginning, they started with like newspaper ads and
they wouldn't mention Maria Duvall. Well, they were supposed to
be research studies and they would ask readers to send
in personal details like their zodiac sign, the time of
their birth, their marital status, in exchange to win a
lot of money. And you remember how it feels like,
you know, in the eighties, there would always be those
(27:27):
mailers to your house with like fill out this consumer question.
So they didn't even bother sending them. They just put
it as an ad in the paper, tell us about you,
and people like okay, sure, and so the conment took
this information and they used it to create profiles, and
then they crossed referenced it with information purchased from data
brokers and two other kinds of lists. They had a
(27:47):
look alike list, which a list of new names and
addresses of people who look in demographics wise like the
current customer base.
Speaker 2 (27:56):
And it's similar to what you're talking about.
Speaker 3 (27:59):
Yeah, doppelganger list.
Speaker 2 (28:00):
This guy looks like you got it, see kid, it's great.
It looks like deb Winger.
Speaker 3 (28:06):
And then there was a shop a like list, so
people who bought similar things as the victims. So they
were just like building these huge profiles. Then the next
part of the scam starts. The victim they get letters
from a French psychic named Maria Duval just out of nowhere,
Clayton Gerber of the US Postal Inspection Services quote. These
would be printed via mail merge, so your name would
(28:28):
appear throughout. These were multi page letters, six or eight
or ten pages long. They would have graphics like they
have changes in font and they would have marginal notes
to make it look like if your eyesight wasn't great,
it would look like somebody had written a handwritten note
on the side of it. They they appeared to be
very personalized, like the letter was written directly to you,
like this was a friend writing to you. And many
(28:50):
people wrote back, yeah, I like that if your eyesight
isn't great. So it's like if I opened it up
and I'd be like, oh yeah, oh look they wrote.
Speaker 2 (28:58):
Me a note, all these little notes on the side.
Speaker 3 (29:01):
Some of the letters even had a fake coffee cup
stain on the paper to make it look more authentic.
Speaker 2 (29:06):
Wow.
Speaker 3 (29:07):
And I guess a lot of people who got the
letters didn't remember filling out the original questionnaire.
Speaker 2 (29:13):
Time past I'm sure.
Speaker 3 (29:14):
Yeah, and well while they run all the list.
Speaker 2 (29:16):
Yeah, you wouldn't think that you'd be.
Speaker 3 (29:17):
And so there was all this personal information and the
personalized letters. They seemed like proof of Maria's abilities. So,
for example, she'd say, you are mainly under the influence
of venus in addition to being born on May twenty second,
nineteen twenty seven, in Kansas City at twelve pm. I
can already see some aspects of your personality. So if
you're just getting this, what you think is just a
(29:39):
cold letter, like that's crazy.
Speaker 2 (29:40):
But she already knows that you like you know broken
for cheese. She's like mentioning it by Tiede. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (29:46):
Here are some more excerpts. Quote two internationally renowned mediums
have predicted what your future holds. The news is fantastic.
Note these four things that are very important to you.
April second, twenty fourteen, Winnings problems solved, Like are you
kidding me? To celebrate your new life, we have prepared
(30:08):
a mysterious and extraordinary gift, a powerful talisman who can
attract money and chance. It's the same talisman that Patrick
Gren wears with him at all times. He never shared it,
but in your case, he didn't. Hesitates Patrick Gwren is
another cycle.
Speaker 2 (30:24):
Sure, like a you're a Geller type whatever.
Speaker 3 (30:27):
And then quote if you've got a special bottle of
Bubbly that you've been saving for celebrating great news, then
now's the time to open it.
Speaker 2 (30:34):
I feel so bad for the people who fall victim
to this.
Speaker 3 (30:37):
Oh my god.
Speaker 2 (30:39):
It's easier for me to always deal with people who
fall victim to a con man because they actively want
to try to like get over on somebody else. Like
I like, I don't mind those so much because it's like, oh,
you tried to get greedy. He thought you could be
on the inside. You thought you could be on the
All of a sudden, somebody turned it on. You're like,
oh no, and you can't even go to the cops.
Speaker 3 (30:55):
Right of counterfeit money machines exactly.
Speaker 2 (30:58):
But like putting a fake ring on and notes on
the side, so people with poor eyesight are confused. I
now know who they're trying to hit. It's mostly old people. Yeah,
you know, it's like and old people who have some
belief in the world, Like, come on on the way out,
you're going to kick them a couple of times and
take those all.
Speaker 3 (31:12):
Horrible anyway, There's this Canadian magazine, The Walrus. They wrote
quote some correspondence directed recipients to purchase supposedly supernatural objects,
while others urged them to use provided green envelopes to
mail personal items, family photographs, palm prints, locks of hair
against a promise that the psychic would use them to
conduct personalized rituals. Once this envelope has been sealed, it
(31:35):
may be only opened by me. Read one letter that
included Duval's photocopied signature. So sometimes the money request would
come only after they responded. Maria would offer more help,
but if they pay, And according to the Postal inspector
Gerber quote, the ask was always for twenty thirty forty dollars.
In return, you might get some sort of tiny trinket,
(31:57):
some sort of little talisman, some sort of newsletter. You
always got another solicitation. You always got another letter that
was a personalized plea asking for more money. And then
there was an escalation of some sixty seventy eighty different letters.
It was a progression. You paid on letter one, you
got letter two, you paid on letter two, you got
letter three. And it was always an ask for money.
Speaker 2 (32:18):
Confuse, are we talking about American political parties? This is
like the emails you get from Oh my God, always
maybe at trinket.
Speaker 3 (32:27):
Here's a bumper sticker. So those talisman trinkets cheap plastic
trinkets mass produced in China. Or it was a quote
vibratory crystal that they described as quote they are wrenched
from the mountains by volcanic eruptions and erosion, falling into
rivers where they are sought for their beauty and their powers.
The crystal is a living stone that has a heart,
(32:48):
a sort of atomic battery with the power to harness
and redirect energy. This pure energy can channel your thoughts
and then change the course of events. As soon as
you wear your vibratory crystal, your mind instantly sharpens and
you feel your energy level surge. Nothing can stand in
your way. You are going to find it easy to
harness that strength to get whatever you want from life
(33:10):
and resolve all your problems.
Speaker 2 (33:12):
Of course, I mean, just put the crystal, the vibratory crystal.
Maybe they're getting like I'm sure these crystals from like
Kazakhstan for like you know, a one ton for five
francs or whatever and then just handing them out. But like,
other than the fact that there are a lot of
people who can point out stuff about like oh crystals
and rocks and that will do some things, you know,
Like but I like how this stuff is always like
it's going to do everything. It's gonna it's gonna fix
(33:34):
your whole life. Might just totally. It could just make
you feel little better, it might orient some energies or whatever. Nope,
they're like, no, this one's going to file your totally.
Speaker 3 (33:43):
So between nineteen ninety four and twenty fourteen, the scam
earned more than one hundred and seventy five million US
dollars from the US and Canada and uh.
Speaker 2 (33:53):
Over the crazy such a small ass.
Speaker 3 (33:55):
Yeah, some got up to like thousands of thousands that
they were handing over. Others had her on their an
old Christmas card.
Speaker 2 (34:01):
It's got to be so many people who follow evict
him to this to get to those numbers.
Speaker 3 (34:04):
Oh, completely, And so let's learn about these two con
men please. Jean Claude Reel was a Swiss businessman and
Jacques Mallard French marketing genius so real he had experienced
in the mail order world. He sold like painkiller bracelets
and a device that instantly ages wine shoe and steps
(34:25):
that help you lose weight and so earlier in.
Speaker 2 (34:30):
His bracelet makes your hair grow back.
Speaker 3 (34:32):
He had been into like UFO stuff earlier in his life. Yeah.
And then he also owned a company called Infojest, the
mail or her company. Yeah, infojest, but with a g
okay jest. Yeah, and so they that was the company
behind the scam Infojest. When CNN tracked him down in
twenty fourteen, Reel told the journalists that while he had
(34:53):
once owned Infojest, he hadn't been involved in many many
years he retired in two thousand and six. Total lies,
not true all And he said he kind of only
knew Maria casually at that time. Mayon, the marketing guy,
you know, he's the one who kind of just connected
the dots.
Speaker 2 (35:11):
He's friends.
Speaker 3 (35:11):
She knew about Maria and France and like, you know,
connected it all over.
Speaker 2 (35:15):
So I've heard of her. I knew people that might
want to know her.
Speaker 3 (35:18):
So they have this Infojess that's in the in North America.
But then they had like a Swiss subsidiary. They had
them all over the world. They're doing this in other countries,
other languages. But here's like, here's an example for North America.
Infojest Direct Marketing wrote and designed the letters, and then
a Canadian company, a different company, printed and addressed them
and then shipped them to a company in Albany, New York,
(35:41):
where they were mailed out in bulk, and then any
responses were sent to commercial mailboxes owned by a Hong
Kong based company called Destiny Research Center, and then those
were gathered and sent to another company, Data Marketing Group
on Long Island.
Speaker 2 (35:55):
Back to America. Uh huh interesting.
Speaker 3 (35:57):
Long Island zaren Yes, Long Island. Yeah, In Long Island. Yes,
I want you to picture picture Long Island. It's your
first day on the job at Data Marketing Group in
Deer Park, New York. You used to work at the
coals at the shopping center down the street, but a
friend clued you in on this gig. You'll be working
in the mailroom, processing letters sent in from customers. That's
(36:18):
what they told you. You're in a five story building
that houses the First National Bank of Long Island. On
the ground floor for blocks on either side of you
or single level office park type places, HVAC companies, etc.
You're being walked around the offices by a guy named Franco.
He wears a big bluetooth earpiece and absolutely stinks of cologne.
He's showing you the cubicles where people type lazily or
(36:40):
talk on the phone. You can't hear what they're saying.
You pass a room with two long tables. A bunch
of women sit along the tables, some scanning checks in
the machine, others running currency through speed counters. They all
wear the same blue polo shirts and latex clubs. No
one looks up as you poke your heavyloone. Franco tells
you that This is the cash room. They process all
of the payments received. He tells you they run about
(37:01):
five hundred thousand dollars every two weeks. You whistle, that's
a lot of money. You ask Franco what people are
buying services? He tells you. As you walk down the
gray carpeted hallway, its short nap showing where from years
of office workers trudging back and forth. You ask Franco
exactly what she'll be doing. Let's watch and you can learn,
he says. He takes you to a large room with
us mail bins stacked along a wall, tons of them.
(37:24):
A man stands at a counter that runs down the
center of the room. A tinny radio plays quietly in
the corner of the room, kerky classical music, competing with
Uhammad the air conditioning system. The man pulls letters from
the mail bin next to him on a cart his
latex love hands expertly using a small letter opener to
slice a on the envelope. You watch as he extracts
a piece of paper, a photo, and a checked He
(37:44):
scans the letter and tosses it into a hole in
the counter. He glances at the photo and tosses it
into that same hole. Then he looks at the check
and carefully places it into a tray in front of him.
Stacks the checks filled a tray. He puts the envelope
into another tray. He opens another letter, this time a
large Manila enflop. He pulls out sheets and sheets of
paper with feeble scrawl filling the page and slanted lines.
(38:05):
He scans the text and tosses it into the hole.
Then he pulls out what looks to be a lock
of hair ough Franco mutters. The man at the counter
looks over at you two and rolls his eyes. Then
he shrugs and unceremoniously tosses the hair in the hole.
Then he reaches into the Manilla envelope and pulls out
a stack of cash, held together with a bunch of
old crackled rubber bands and yellows and tans and pinks.
(38:26):
He places the cash into a strong box next to
the check tray and puts the Manilla envelope in the
other tray. Franco turns to you and claps you on
the shoulder. He tells you he thinks you've got it
figured out. That Philip there will answer any questions you
may have. He tells you that your lunch break is
at eleven forty five. Then he turns and walks away
down the hall. Let's take a break. Yeah, I have
to split this one up.
Speaker 2 (38:47):
It's a lunch break.
Speaker 3 (38:48):
Lunch break eleven forty five. All right, when we come back,
we'll get back on the scene. All right, Zarin, we're
(39:13):
in Long Island.
Speaker 2 (39:14):
I'm still enjoying your stunch break. Yeah, I come back
for your lunch break.
Speaker 3 (39:18):
Okay. So you head into the mail room with Philip,
and you stand at the counter opposite of him. The
two of you introduce yourselves and he tells you to
wheel a mail bin over on the cart and get started.
He tells you to put on some gloves from the
box on the table in the corner, and then he
tells you to start opening the mail. Pull out the
letter if there is one, read through it and make
sure there's no credit card or bank information written on it.
(39:40):
Then toss it in the hole. Look for any pictures
or mementos or little gifts, toss those in the hole. Two.
Then pull out any money, cash, check, money order, whatever,
and place it in the appropriate tray or box. He
tells you someone will come by every hour to empty
the trays. Oh, and there are cameras up in the
corners by the ceiling, so don't try any funny business.
Then you got to put the envelope and the envelope tray,
so you track the names and addresses. You grab your
(40:02):
first envelope and get to work. You use the little
tool to slice it open. It holds a short letter
on a note card, which you read over quickly. It's
asking someone named Maria for help. They want to know
if their daughter will ever come home. Apparently she went
missing when she was six. That was twelve years ago.
There's a photo too, a gap tooth little girl and pigtail,
smiles up at the camera, the sun in her eyes.
I put these in the hole. You ask Philip yep,
(40:24):
he tells you. You ask him how everything gets filed
when it's all jumbled in the bin under the hole.
That's the trash man, he tells you. A guy comes
by every couple of hours to empty it out, goes
out to the dumpster. Photos, swatches of clothing, locks of
hair thrown away. You feel sick. You take the check
that was in the envelope. Two hundred and fifty dollars
and place it in the empty tray in front of you.
(40:45):
You stare at it for a bit, and then you
turn and walk out of the room. You head straight
for the elevators and go out to your car and
drive home. Third one this month, Philip mutters to himself
as he slices open another envelope of desperation.
Speaker 2 (40:57):
Oh my god, my heart breaks. I just want to
go fight these frenchmen.
Speaker 3 (41:01):
Right.
Speaker 2 (41:01):
Oh my god, knuckle up, Come on, Frank.
Speaker 3 (41:04):
Now that I've bummed you out the day at Data marketing,
processing payments, this is why I can't write that book.
Would you say it does that?
Speaker 2 (41:12):
When you said that circular hole, I was like, that's
gonna be the circular file the screenplays go into. I
know this.
Speaker 3 (41:19):
So remember Maria was in name only, was saying that
the personal items would help with the readings. Oh my god,
folks at Data Marketing, just throw them away. Enter Patrice Runner.
Speaker 2 (41:29):
All right, he's Runner.
Speaker 3 (41:30):
He's the main man on this whole info just stuff
in North America. Oh yeah, So he met up in
the eighties night you know, late eighties, early nineties with
Mayo and Real and the Maria Duvalscan was up and
running in Europe at that point, and he's like, I'm
from Canada. Let's do North America.
Speaker 2 (41:47):
Got you?
Speaker 3 (41:48):
So he goes out to France wants to meet Maria
and then get the rights to do North America. And
she did a reading on him and is then girlfriend.
They're convinced she's the real deal.
Speaker 2 (41:58):
Huh.
Speaker 3 (41:58):
So he does. He's the one who starts the North
America Maria Duval direct Malee, Okay.
Speaker 2 (42:03):
He's like, I got a big market of suckers.
Speaker 3 (42:05):
Yeah, and he's got the blessing of Mayon and Real
of course, who were just soaking Europe at this time.
Speaker 2 (42:10):
Oh my goodness.
Speaker 3 (42:11):
So he gives Duval a five percent royalty and I'm
sure he's kicking up to Mayon and Real, but Duval's
five percent royalty was several hundred thousand dollars a year.
That's how much money. And so he you know, he
does the ads in the newspaper, and he was writing
his own copy at first, and then he started hiring copywriters.
Imagine getting that job of writing these letters.
Speaker 2 (42:32):
I mean, yes and no, Like it's one of those
ones like I totally think it'll be fun, until I
realized what I was doing and then I absolutely hate it.
Speaker 3 (42:38):
Like he was pulling in like for on the first day.
Speaker 2 (42:41):
Yeah, he was.
Speaker 3 (42:43):
Pulling in for him, like twenty three million a year,
and he lived in he had he lived in Whistler,
Costa Rica, Switzerland, Paris, Ibiza, and he and his family
traveled all over because like he doesn't have to do anything,
it's on autopilot. Between twenty six and twenty fourteen, his
company sent out at least fifty six million Maria Duval letters.
Speaker 2 (43:06):
How are there that many people calling for the.
Speaker 3 (43:09):
He did like ab testing between different versions of the letter,
so he would like test him out on groups of
fifty thousand to see which had more people respond according
to AARP, which you know they were like their bat
signal went off.
Speaker 2 (43:21):
Oh yeah.
Speaker 3 (43:21):
Federal investigators estimate the scam impacted one in three hundred Americans,
about one point four million victims, and raked in over
two hundred million dollars, with a similar proportion in Canada.
Speaker 2 (43:33):
That's a lot.
Speaker 3 (43:34):
One in three hundred. US Postal inspectors. They start getting
complaints around two thousand and six. In two thousand and seven,
the US Postal Inspectors they filed a cease and desist
order against Maria Duval, Patrese Runner, and then others, including
a company called Zodiac Zone.
Speaker 2 (43:50):
That sounds like such nonsense.
Speaker 4 (43:52):
I know.
Speaker 3 (43:52):
I don't know if runners or if it's a different
partner in the scam. It just it gets really murky,
get thrown in there.
Speaker 2 (43:59):
Oh yeah.
Speaker 3 (44:00):
A settlement was negotiated and the individuals named agreed to
cease operations. Zodiac Zone just changed its name and continued
to do business as usual.
Speaker 2 (44:09):
Using the same male system.
Speaker 4 (44:11):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (44:11):
Everything just now we're like Bodiac Bone.
Speaker 2 (44:14):
I don't know.
Speaker 3 (44:15):
And although Patre's Runner was one of the people originally sued,
his lawyers negotiated to later have his name removed from
the lawsuit, arguing that he'd already left the business and
had nothing to do with the scam. That is a
complete lie, totally involved. The FTC already knew about Runner
in nineteen ninety seven. They reached out to him to
(44:35):
verify claims in an ad that he was running for
Svelt Patch. Svelt Patch it was a skin patch that
was supposed to melt away body fat. What Yeah, and
if you can believe it, Zarin, he didn't have any
proof that Svelt Patch would actually help people drop pounds,
what is not crazy? So his company was ordered to
pay the FTC three hundred and seventy five thousand dollars,
(44:57):
mainly to pay back the people who bought the pack.
Speaker 2 (45:00):
Okay, that was go around what he had made. So
it wasn't like he made seven million and had to
pay three hundreds. I don't operating costs.
Speaker 3 (45:07):
Yeah, I don't know what his full hall was. I'm
praying that that was.
Speaker 2 (45:10):
Like helping this restitution.
Speaker 3 (45:11):
A few years later, the FEDS tried again, according to
that book, a Deal with the Devil. In twenty fourteen,
USPIS Inspector Thomas Ninen was looking into a different fraud
when he saw an alarming number of withdrawal requests were
being denied for payments to one business in particular with
an intriguing name, Destiny Research Center, a company registered in
(45:31):
Hong Kong. So twenty fourteen, the Department of Justice filed
a lawsuit against Duval and Patrick Gurrin, the other psychic,
and so the lawsuit temporarily prevented Data Marketing Group. That's
where you were working for a little bit.
Speaker 2 (45:46):
Of course, how could I forget.
Speaker 3 (45:47):
And info just direct marketing runners company in Montreal, Montreal
from sending out letters to the US. Three Info Just
Canada employees were named, but not Runner, who avoided being
named in the lawsuit.
Speaker 2 (46:00):
Yeah good lawyer.
Speaker 3 (46:01):
Runner said that he didn't know the envelopes filled with
hair and photos weren't being sent to Duval in France.
I know harro photos, but that's one hundred percent falls
he set.
Speaker 2 (46:09):
The whole thing up, is his organization. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (46:12):
Twenty sixteen, the lawsuits settled. None of the eight defendants,
including Duval and Garren, admitted guilt, but they were all
barred from sending letters in the United States.
Speaker 2 (46:21):
And none of this was any letters, I guess because
they're not promising anything.
Speaker 3 (46:25):
I don't know, but there's like hank money involved, I
don't know. Twenty eighteen, the US Postal Inspector and other
US government officials came to Maria's house in southern France,
like that's a junket. But at this point she had
like really advanced and.
Speaker 2 (46:40):
Mess Yeah, she's like out of it entire I mean
she's aged.
Speaker 3 (46:45):
So they didn't learn much, but they got a trip
to the South France courtesy of Uncle Sam.
Speaker 2 (46:48):
I like to see postal carriers out there.
Speaker 3 (46:50):
Exactly. However, you know they're facing potential criminal charges. Some
Infojest employees helped the US government in charges against Runner,
maybe Philip in the mail room Runner was charged. Runner
was charged in absentia in twenty eighteen. In twenty twenty,
he was located living in a tent on the beach
(47:13):
in Ibatza.
Speaker 4 (47:14):
What.
Speaker 3 (47:14):
Yeah, his wife had left him and kicked him out.
Oh my god, and he had no money. This is
beautifully living. He was arrested and extradited back to the
US in the fall.
Speaker 2 (47:26):
Of twenty So he wasn't doing like an ayahuasca cleanse.
He was just beat town broke. He was with bad
facial hair, hanging out in the tent.
Speaker 3 (47:36):
In June of twenty twenty three, he was found guilty
of fourteen counts of mail and wire fraud. There it is.
He faces up to twenty years in prison per count.
But he's still a waiting sentencing.
Speaker 2 (47:48):
Oh, he going to get it.
Speaker 3 (47:48):
Yeah. He has maintained that while what he did may
not have been moral, it wasn't fraud.
Speaker 2 (47:53):
Oh my god. That's a terrible I know.
Speaker 3 (47:56):
And that magazine The Walrus, they said. In his trial,
his lawyers argued that quote, psychic services are inherently misleading
and therefore could not be fraud.
Speaker 2 (48:05):
Oh yeah, yeah, that's actually a very interesting argument. Look,
everybody knows, they knows, so if you fall for it,
I mean, come on, but you know.
Speaker 3 (48:13):
And a bit of good news because the uspis settled
with the data broker for one hundred and twenty seven
point five million what they were able to pay back
many of Maria's victims.
Speaker 2 (48:24):
Oh that's the least good. Yeah, there's something there, like
they get some sense of justice Financially, I'm still hung
up on the throwing out the pictures and the little
bits of talismanic juice that these people are sending over there.
Speaker 3 (48:39):
The little bits of hope.
Speaker 2 (48:40):
Yes, I just I hope that the Postal Service is
able to actually get them all on these charges. And
I'm not somebody who's like, yeah, throw them away and
lock them up, throw away the key and all that. No. No,
but seriously, for these guys, well, I think under the prison, I.
Speaker 3 (48:56):
Don't know where real is. Myom has passed away, but anyway,
they're horrible, and I hope all bad things happen here.
Speaker 2 (49:03):
We take some money from his I'm not going to
come out to his family.
Speaker 3 (49:08):
Captain d give me a talk back. God, I went cheat.
Speaker 4 (49:23):
Hey, Elizabeth hay Saren, longtime listener, first time color so
I just want to say thank you for bringing me
laughs near like every week. I started listening to these
by myself, but when you got got to the Cocaine Bear,
I just had to share it with my dad. So
(49:44):
thanks to bringing us both laughter. Have a good day. Bye,
hey again. Also, I would so buy a Sandalwood University
T shirt, just saying please.
Speaker 1 (49:59):
Do those right.
Speaker 2 (50:02):
Yes, the dreamcatch.
Speaker 3 (50:04):
I like how Cocaine Bear brings families together.
Speaker 2 (50:08):
Really beautiful, so beautiful. Thank you so much.
Speaker 3 (50:13):
Good job for bringing that into this world. That's all
I have for today. You can find us online at
ridiculous Crime dot com. We're also on the internet. Email
us at ridiculous Crime at gmail dot com, and please
leave a talk back on the iHeart app. We love
those reach out reach out. Ridiculous Crime is hosted by
(50:38):
Elizabeth Dutton and Sarah Burnett, produced and edited by cash
Room supervisor Dave Cousten. Research is by Madame Marissa Brown,
Psychic to the Stars and Zodiac enthusiast, and by that
I mean the rafts Andrea song Sharpen Tear. The theme
song is by mail order. Empresarios Thomas Lee and Travis Dutton.
Post wardrobe is provided by Botany five hundred. Guest hair
(51:00):
and makeup provided by Sparkleshot and Mister Andre. Executive producers
are Missing Hiker, Ben Bollen and Crystal Ballwaxer Nol Brown.
Speaker 1 (51:13):
Ridicous Crime Say It One More Timequeous cry Ridiculous Crime
is a production of iHeartRadio four more podcasts. My heart Radio,
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.
Ridiculous Crime is a production of iHeartRadio Zaren.
Speaker 2 (00:03):
Oh yes, career, what's up?
Speaker 3 (00:06):
Listen? You know it's ridiculous.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
Oh yes, oh okay. You know the expression w w
obd wwobd. What would Olivia Benson do? Right? Yes, So
your girl Olivia Benson aka Mariska hargatea.
Speaker 3 (00:26):
On lawn order s su for those which.
Speaker 2 (00:29):
Isn't mean yes. So she was in the in the
park in New York, in a park in New York,
not Central Park, just in a park, and she was
shooting part of the twenty fifth season, the historic twenty
fifth season. Yeah, and this little girl approached her and
asked her for help because she recognized that she was
a cop, and so she literally helped a citizen as
Olivia Benson. And since she was able to help her
(00:51):
find her mother, see, they were in like I guess
Fort Tryon Park trying anyway, So the girl goes over
and she has to, like like Bariska Hartday, has to
halt production and then takes about twenty minutes. But they
helped the child locate her mother, and so she does
like full Olivia Benson and there's like photos of them
like getting together. It's like, oh see, my god. Oh
(01:11):
yeah right, and you're just like, is this real? Yeah,
so there you go, and.
Speaker 3 (01:16):
Uh I am silent screaming in especially heinous right now.
Speaker 2 (01:23):
So there you go.
Speaker 3 (01:24):
Oh my god.
Speaker 2 (01:24):
Yeah, I thought that was a little ridiculous when reality becomes.
Speaker 3 (01:28):
Yeah, well she's she's a very well known for you, captain.
Speaker 2 (01:33):
Oh yeah, but totally. But it's also like, you know,
she's a what nine time Woman of the Year award winner.
Speaker 3 (01:39):
Well, you know I have I have those reading glasses
that we call the Olivia Benson.
Speaker 2 (01:42):
Yes, your cheaters, you're Olivia Benson.
Speaker 3 (01:45):
It's a god bless her.
Speaker 2 (01:47):
What's ridiculous for you, Elizabeth?
Speaker 3 (01:50):
Another thing that's ridiculous using your psychic powers for greed
when you could use them for silliness, Like I was.
(02:18):
This is Ridiculous Crime, a podcast about absurd and outrageous capers, heists,
and cons. It's always ninety nine percent murder free in
one hundred percent ridiculous.
Speaker 2 (02:30):
Saren. Yes, Oh sorry me.
Speaker 3 (02:33):
I thought you were going to give me a like
ooh buddy or whatever You're going to say, Oh, well,
you know I have you damn right.
Speaker 2 (02:39):
I don't know. I'd like to surprise you. So you're like,
I thought you were going to come in hot. No, Okay,
well you damn right.
Speaker 3 (02:45):
Yeah, there it is. You know. I've written a couple
of books, yes, and I got them published. Yes, and
I am slash was working on a new one and
I stepped away from it for a few reasons.
Speaker 2 (02:56):
Yes, why did you?
Speaker 3 (02:57):
I'm totally disillusioned by the publishing industry.
Speaker 2 (02:59):
That's it's a crock.
Speaker 3 (03:01):
I let my agent go a while back, and I
don't feel like hustling another one. Yeah, and I feel
like there's just not a place for me. And publishing
is just so dysfunctional.
Speaker 2 (03:09):
It's pretty wild right now. I hear a lot of
the sad stories.
Speaker 3 (03:12):
I have enough dysfunctional mess I don't need more.
Speaker 2 (03:15):
You don't need that ADJECTI.
Speaker 3 (03:16):
Another reason I stepped away is because the book is
kind of heavy, just physically physically heavy psych I always
ask people starting creative projects if it's something they want
to live in for however long it'll take.
Speaker 2 (03:29):
You've asked me that. Yeah, I appreciate, it's never answered
the question. I consider.
Speaker 3 (03:33):
I think that this one was kind of messing with me,
And so.
Speaker 2 (03:35):
You didn't ask yourself.
Speaker 3 (03:36):
No, I didn't you know? And so I love the idea,
but with the world the way it is and where
I am in my life, I just want to have
fun and laughs.
Speaker 2 (03:43):
Sarin, I get it. I told get it.
Speaker 3 (03:45):
Yeah, and that's what I get to do here. So
you have fun, laugh, dance. You cut the tether on
that way and said, let's totally float baby. So you're
probably thinking cool story, bro or man, this is a Wendy's.
Speaker 2 (03:56):
I have a point. I was actually thinking cool Wendy's, ma'am.
Speaker 3 (04:01):
And I was reading up on this lady. I'm going
to tell you about there are tons of parallels to
a character in my book. It's uncanny, Like you've read
parts of the book.
Speaker 2 (04:11):
Yeah, written chapters, and you'll.
Speaker 3 (04:13):
See you'll see where this all comes together. And like
the whole thing was kind of freaking me out as
I'm reading it, and I'm not sure, Like I looked
up and I am sure that I've never heard of
her before.
Speaker 2 (04:23):
Yeah, process of just the news.
Speaker 3 (04:27):
No, And there are strong elements that tie her story
to part of my book. And I'm wondering is that
a sign? And does this mean I should try finishing
the thing. Does it mean that I'm psychic.
Speaker 2 (04:39):
I think so, because the lady I'm going.
Speaker 3 (04:41):
To tell you about, Maria Duval, is a psychic.
Speaker 2 (04:43):
Oh yes, yeah.
Speaker 3 (04:45):
Is this some sort of cosmic connection.
Speaker 2 (04:47):
We're going to say, a finger reaching out of the ether, Yes, to.
Speaker 3 (04:51):
Tickle me ether. So Maria Duval she was born Maria
Carolina Gamba in nineteen thirty seven in Milan, in Italy.
Speaker 2 (05:00):
That's a place to be born. Yeah, Milan.
Speaker 3 (05:03):
Have ever been. Yeah, it's very Germany.
Speaker 2 (05:08):
Very It feels very much like a financial town, all
the stuff that you think of. Yeah, it's all about
you know. Anyway, I'd like it a lot.
Speaker 3 (05:15):
Yeah, Maria. She got married a bunch of times, and
so Duval was the name of her second husband. She
kind of stuck with that one. So she moved to
France with her family when she was young and according
to her, special powers run in her family of course,
and ever since she was a little girl, she's had
clairvoyant visions and she didn't think that was special. She thought, well,
that's what we all have.
Speaker 2 (05:35):
Yeah, I think the same thing.
Speaker 3 (05:36):
This is what she said on her website quote, in
my family, we have possessed spiritual gifts for generations. The
Golden flex that you see in my eyes form quote
the sign in the Middle Ages, I would have been
burnt at the stake.
Speaker 2 (05:49):
Really, I've never heard golden flex was a sign of
a witch before. I Maybe I just don't get around
in the right well.
Speaker 3 (05:54):
I don't know. Maybe it's a French Italian thing.
Speaker 2 (05:56):
That's a lot of things I don't know.
Speaker 3 (05:57):
So, you know, same more so for me. According to
oh No, So anyway, her uncle, yes, father Camillo Vasally,
He was a priest in Ravenna, small city in northern Italy,
and so according to her Maria, he performed miracles and
the town considered him a saint, a little lesser, lesser
known saint. Yeah. And when he was on his deathbed
(06:19):
in nineteen fifty three, he called Maria to.
Speaker 2 (06:21):
Him and it was there a distance.
Speaker 3 (06:23):
Yeah, He's like, you know, we're like people, what we beat? Maria,
Come here, I'm dying. And so Maria goes like, yeah,
what's up? And he transfers the gift to her. That
was what it sounded like. Oh completely, So he told her,
I know you have the power already because of your eyes,
(06:47):
your eyeball gol. Yeah, and so I'm going to give
you my powers on top of double down, and you
have to use these powers for good, to help and
comfort others.
Speaker 2 (06:56):
You're super powered up.
Speaker 3 (06:58):
Yeah. Then he was like, here have this talisman.
Speaker 2 (07:01):
Like fireball Mario.
Speaker 3 (07:02):
Now, when I was young and reading books and anytime
they'd like present someone with a talisman, I thought that
was the coolest thing ever.
Speaker 2 (07:09):
Oh yeah, completely was like, I want a tal man.
I've waited my whole life for someone like this talisman.
It is very important.
Speaker 3 (07:16):
I'm going to use it on some sort of quest anyway.
Her talisman was a gold pendulum on a chain, and
she would later use it to do stuff like find people.
Speaker 2 (07:25):
Oh okay, so like divining past.
Speaker 3 (07:27):
Yeah, she didn't become a professional psychic right away.
Speaker 2 (07:30):
She wore a hypnotist with the pendula. Yeah, like he
was looking into my eyes.
Speaker 3 (07:37):
For a while, So she's not a psychic off the bat.
She worked as a scout at a couple of art
galleries in Paris.
Speaker 2 (07:43):
Was an art scout.
Speaker 3 (07:44):
Yeah, okay, like a cub scout, but an art scout.
Speaker 2 (07:47):
She wore the outfit shelpist.
Speaker 3 (07:49):
She would gather badges, she looks for lost artists. Sometimes
she'd help artists find new stronger names. More in line
with the Kabbalah that would bring them a better chance
at success. Okay, I don't know what that means. She
worked at a large bank, Like your.
Speaker 2 (08:06):
Name is Pablo Fancy and how about Picasso.
Speaker 3 (08:09):
Exactly, So she's worked. She worked at a bank, not
as a teller, but she helped narrow down candidates for
executive positions using quote, graphological, morphological, and astrological texts.
Speaker 2 (08:23):
So she looks at their handwriting, looks at their face,
and then she looks.
Speaker 3 (08:26):
At the resumes, and she's like good bad good good bad,
like puts them into piles. She also said that she
worked with many other heads of industry, helping them set
up their companies. And she said that she can't make
problems disappear, but she can identify them and like point
people that you know what's wrong.
Speaker 2 (08:44):
Your foot's broken, exactly, Doc.
Speaker 3 (08:47):
That's in the corporate world. It's a huge problem, broken foot.
So she'd also help businesses set dates to make important
decisions or like for movies to premiere. So this is
like we're getting in Nancy Reagan territory.
Speaker 2 (09:00):
They're like, give me a special date.
Speaker 3 (09:01):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (09:02):
At history different figure out why the thing had happened on.
Speaker 3 (09:05):
Is how she explains right or the times of such.
She said, people are really surprised when you have to
time a film release to coincide with the full moon,
because when there's a full moon, people are much more
likely to go out than during other lunar phases.
Speaker 2 (09:20):
Of course, they can see more at night, especure heart attacks. Whatever.
Speaker 3 (09:24):
She wasn't just doing this. She had another job as
a She owned a pool and sauna cleaning business. You know,
it's adjacent.
Speaker 2 (09:34):
She's not actually cleaning the sauna's issue.
Speaker 3 (09:36):
I think she probably hired.
Speaker 2 (09:38):
She had like a bunch of like boys and like
cut off shorts clean but still she's like.
Speaker 3 (09:44):
We will only clean under you know, mercury.
Speaker 2 (09:47):
But she gets a call, she's like, oh, I gotta
go divine the mood.
Speaker 3 (09:52):
She owned clothing stores in the south of France, in
and around the town of Callous, and she like Maria Callis. Yes,
it was at one of the stores that she started
giving psychic readings, where she's like, Okay, I'm not just
going to manipulate industry.
Speaker 2 (10:06):
I'm a personal person.
Speaker 3 (10:08):
I'm going to manipulate people. And she started getting attention
just locally at first, for seven years she worked at
three different radio stations doing astrological charts for listeners. Yes,
she's like, call her here on the air.
Speaker 2 (10:21):
I always going to be a ventriloquist on the radio.
That was the whole thing. There were a lot of
ventriloquists on the radio, like how great is that?
Speaker 3 (10:29):
It's just like two people exactly, but it's.
Speaker 2 (10:31):
Like the whole thing and you're now matching someone having
the puppet.
Speaker 3 (10:34):
There astrologery like the magic of radio.
Speaker 2 (10:37):
Yeah, but then astrologers like the same thing. They're like,
you know, they're just sitting there and like their pajamas,
but they're actually like before the crystal ball. Yeah, they
don't have to do it, don't have to pay for
smoke bombs.
Speaker 4 (10:48):
No.
Speaker 3 (10:49):
And so she also she had a segment on French
TV called Bibi Bonu where she'd give horoscopes to babies
on their first birthdays.
Speaker 2 (11:00):
She's about to say it, Wait a minute.
Speaker 3 (11:03):
She's a little bit of this, a little bit of this.
By the seventies, she was showing up in the paper
and nice for her psychic work.
Speaker 2 (11:12):
She was she was in French vogue.
Speaker 3 (11:15):
OK. So she said at first she didn't want to
change people. She just wanted to help people. But eventually
she became a professional. So she studied for ten years
at an esoteric school and she ten years, yeah, ten years,
and she joined quoting various movements, including Druidic movements.
Speaker 2 (11:37):
Okay, yeah, but.
Speaker 3 (11:38):
That didn't work out because she don't like the robes. No,
she was like, I'm Italian and so I'm more inclined
towards Greco Latin modalities. Oh of course, She's like, it's
too white for me.
Speaker 2 (11:50):
And so much walking in a circle got a chanting.
I like, more like laying about in smoke exactly, more
fruit involved in my ceremonies.
Speaker 3 (11:57):
So she said. She later established the French Institute for
Parapsychological Research to foster that, and she was also the president,
also a member, also a member, and it was sometimes
called the Callous Parapsychology Institute. Okay, there's this book called
A Deal with the Devil about Maria Tufall, and it
came out in twenty eighteen and in it, authors Blake
(12:17):
Ellis and Melanie Hicken, they write, quote, she claims that
she has provided guidance to Hollywood stars who pay seven
hundred dollars for a session, and several American presidents and
many other political leaders. In fact, she says many of
the world's richest and most famous celebrities never make a
decision without consulting her first, and that she is the
only psychic ever to have been granted an audience with
(12:39):
the Pope.
Speaker 2 (12:40):
Okay, you know, like if you're on social media right, like,
and you follow some of the people I follow, you're
going to get things of like yo, I got like, okay,
my people are sitting now they're going they're doing a
humiliation ritual on this side the celebrity. Right, It'll be like,
you know, some young black celebrity has to be humiliated,
so now they can join the illuminati. Oh right, I've
seen claims and I'm like, come on, now, you really
(13:01):
come on people. But at the same time, then you
go on this side. When we were investigating, it's always
like the President came to me, I met with the Pope,
and I'm like, okay, So a lot of people believe
in these occult things, so like, oh yeah, I think
that some of these people when they come out there
with the it's a humiliation ritual and see where they're trying.
I'm like some of them have to be right, and
just the numbers exactly. I'm not saying which ones, but
(13:23):
because of how much we're hearing from the other end
of the well, presidents came here and decided when should
I start the war?
Speaker 3 (13:29):
Exactly exactly, So a humiliation ritual for a.
Speaker 2 (13:32):
Young to join the illuminati or whatever. I'm not necessarily backing,
but one.
Speaker 3 (13:37):
With the pope. CNN did an investigation into her with
these authors, and they later revealed that, according to a friend,
Maria had technically met with the Pope and shook his hand,
but she was like part of a crowd. Oh so,
and there was not like a personal audience.
Speaker 2 (13:52):
Ah yeah, so met the pope. I read the same
as the Pope.
Speaker 3 (13:56):
Yeah, exactly. She shook his hand, she reached out over
a bunch of other people high five during So about
that talisman and the missing person and.
Speaker 2 (14:07):
The missing you were wondering, I just checked my notes.
Speaker 3 (14:09):
Thank you for asking.
Speaker 2 (14:10):
You haven't circled back.
Speaker 3 (14:12):
I'm about to circle back.
Speaker 2 (14:13):
Put a pin in it.
Speaker 3 (14:14):
There are a lot of variations on this story, but
here suggest around nineteen seventy seven, the wife of a
young dentist disappeared. It is not important to know that
he was a dentist. Yeah, but this is this is
in the south of France. She took off her car
on like a Tuesday afternoon and no one had seen
her after that, and then hikers found her car the
(14:36):
next morning abandoned. She was nowhere to be found. And
this is pre cell phone, mind you, so they couldn't
try and call or like look for her.
Speaker 2 (14:44):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (14:45):
The authorities sent out search parties, two helicopters, the fire
brigade end quote the best police dog in the region,
called Droll four. Researcher Marissa pointed out that no information
is available about the presumed police dogs Droll one, two
and three where they also amazing was one a bad apple?
(15:08):
Where was there a mister or missus droll? Keep in
mind that in French droll means funny. It can also
mean odd in some idioms, so like is it's a
funny old word or present I had I have an
odd premonition and I'm probably not saying those right, and
(15:29):
that's maybe a little I'm understanding them. You've got it
because I translated the language work. It's the language of ridiculousness.
So who was droll for a weird little When you
Google image search droll for dog, you get lots of
weird AI cat pictures and then they're like leggings with
cats printed in the eyes are on the crotch. I
(15:50):
don't know, just do it image search for ivy for
dog and then you get all this weird Anyway, Maria
she saw the story about the missing woman in the
paper and she offered to help. And she asked for
the woman's date of birth, a recent photo, and a
map of the area. And she put the photo on
the map and then held the gold pendulum over the map,
(16:13):
and the pendulum it starts to swing as they do,
and it starts to spin over a certain region, and
the cops they're skeptical, this kind of seems like a
waste of time and hokum at that. So they called
back the rescue helicopter. They're like, you know what, we
give up.
Speaker 2 (16:28):
It's a pendulum that's sending you out there.
Speaker 3 (16:30):
And they're like, maybe she disappeared on purpose and taken
herself out of the game, so to speak. So the husband, though,
is like, no more helicopter, helicopter, and so he hires
a private helicopter and says search over where the pendulum
was spinning, and so he believed in her. He knew
his wife was still out there waiting to be found.
Speaker 2 (16:48):
And she was what.
Speaker 3 (16:50):
She was, hurt and unconscious. She hadn't eaten or had
anything to drink or even move for three days and
nights and she was discovered and Marie, I said, the
pendulum worked because quote, everything in the universe vibrates and
sends out different waves. To find something or someone that
has gone missing, the vibrations which hold a connection with
the subject or the person must be investigated and determined.
(17:14):
That is what I did with the help of the
star sign and the photo of the woman. Then I
simply gave the information to my hanging lamp and asked
for the source of these vibrations to be pointed out
on the map.
Speaker 2 (17:23):
You know, it's easy to the CIA. I have it.
They have a whole program that is taken from the
one guy's other program. He's like around to hear anyway,
the CIA, they have a whole thing. I've been reading
a bunch about how to psychically trained according to the CIA,
and is all this exact same stuff. Let's do it.
Speaker 3 (17:38):
Let's start us. Let's do a seminar.
Speaker 2 (17:39):
Okay, okay, I'm down.
Speaker 3 (17:41):
So we'll host a seminar and we don't know how
to do it. Oh we're gonna host you yeah, yea, yeah,
we're okay. No, no, no, We're going to put on so
much easier. I know it'll be a ridiculous grind. So
the story of this incredible vibration went viral by seventy
standards all over France. People heard about it and they
felt that Maria was the real deal, like a psychic hero.
(18:03):
It said that in total she helped find nineteen people
over the years. Yeah, and plus some cats and a donkey,
the missing donkey. Oh and she said she found Brigitte
Bardeau's missing dog. Okay, And the only problem is that
Bardew later told CNN that her dog was found dead
drowned in a pool and that Duval had nothing to
do with any of it, which is a bummer detail.
Speaker 2 (18:24):
Wait, so she lied about finding Bridget Bardew's dog. When
someone went to question that, Bridget Bardow is like, well,
if I got a story for you, Oh yeah, no,
she had nothing.
Speaker 3 (18:32):
But this is horrible and I'm an animal lover and
somehow I let my dog drown Wow. So Maria said
that she was involved in quote, one of the biggest
criminal cases the world has ever known. Let's take a break.
When we come back, I'll tell you about the biggest
criminal case the world has ever known.
Speaker 2 (19:09):
Zaren yo. Hey, so we were talking about Maria Duval.
I was thinking about bridge Bordo's dog.
Speaker 3 (19:13):
But there's that too. Let's give a moment of yeah. Okay,
we gave him over the rainbow. Yeah, the rambow bridge.
All right, So Maria Duval she said that she was
involved in one of the biggest criminal cases the world
has ever known. Yes, that's the Raoul Vallenberg case.
Speaker 2 (19:28):
Oh wait a minute, Raoul Wallenberg. Uh huh okay Vallenburg sure, yes,
I'm saying it wrong.
Speaker 3 (19:33):
Swedish architect, Yes, and a diplomat who saved thousands of
Jews in German occupied Hungary during the Holocaust.
Speaker 2 (19:40):
How is she involved, Well, let's give me.
Speaker 3 (19:42):
Let me tell you a little bit more about him.
He was Sweden's Special envoy in Budapest between July and
December of nineteen forty four, and in that time he
issued protective passports sheltered Jews and buildings, which he declared
Swedish territory. So January seventeenth, nineteen forty five, during the
siege of Budapest by the Red arm Me agents captured
Vollenberg and accused him of espionage, and then he disappeared.
(20:06):
Nineteen fifty seven, twelve years after he went missing, Soviet
authorities said he died of a heart attack two years
after he had been last seen, and that he'd been
locked up in Lubyanka, the secret police's prison in Moscow.
Speaker 2 (20:19):
He died of weak art.
Speaker 3 (20:20):
Yeah, he's so sad. The family didn't believe this.
Speaker 2 (20:23):
Yes, no, really, and there.
Speaker 3 (20:24):
Had been reports and whisperings that Vallenberg had been seen
in Soviet prisons and mental institutions in subsequent years. So
they reached out to Maria and they asked if he
was still in the Russian prison or maybe had he escaped.
She was like, let me think on it. She gets
the pendulum. She's like, he had a heart attack, he died.
When they said he did, she said that he had
(20:47):
it because he'd been tortured. So she adds in a
little bit of extra juice. Sorry, And during her consultations
for this and others, she generally used tarot cards.
Speaker 2 (20:57):
She does, like remote viewing via tarot card I.
Speaker 3 (20:59):
Think, so, yeah, there's a lot of stuff she doesn't like.
Other things she'd do, she'd ask people to hit a
bell three times, you know, shuttles and then splash inc
thirteen times, of course, and then she'd interpret the answers
out of that, and so like, if she was having
a really hard time with a vision, she'd use a
(21:20):
crystal ball, And apparently those are really hard work and
they take a lot of concentration, so she wasn't into that.
So you know, she's established herself. She had this personal secretary,
Francois bar and Francoise later became the mayor of the
small French town that Maria lived in, Callous, and she
(21:41):
vouched for Maria's abilities. She said she'd seen it all
in action. She said that there was a motorcyclist who'd
been in an accident and couldn't walk very well, and
that Maria apparently used her power of radiothesia, which is
sensitiveness held to enable a person with the aid of
a divining rod or pendulum to detect things. You know
who said that Webster's Dictionary, oh defines radiothesia, so basically
(22:05):
divining rods. So she used that on the motorcycle boy.
Speaker 2 (22:09):
Feeling through the form of radiant.
Speaker 3 (22:11):
Yeah, like she's just like she's holding like two sticks.
She spent an hour with the guy just swinging the
old pendulum over him. When she was done, he walked
away normally amazing, incredible, that a miracle, some would Barr
also said there was another woman who would always call
(22:33):
Maria asking for good lotto numbers, and that woman was
not me. Uh So Maria would tell her to be
careful with her money and take out a low interest
loan to pay off her debt, which is more debt
to pay off debt. But okay, sure that doesn't make
sense to be anyway. I guess consolidate her debt is
what she's saying.
Speaker 2 (22:49):
I'm the one to talk about.
Speaker 3 (22:50):
Woman didn't want to hear all that. Yeah, and she
wanted the lotto numbers. She's like, that's great and all.
Speaker 2 (22:55):
But what of the lives? What's the winning numbers?
Speaker 3 (22:57):
And she she kept calling and Maria just started ignoring her.
Keep calling me alone, Becky. And so she said people
who wanted an instant fixed were just a waste of
her time.
Speaker 2 (23:08):
She wanted nothing to do with them.
Speaker 3 (23:09):
People asked her to predict their deaths, and that was
apparently something she could do. Yeah, but no, you thought
about it, No do you?
Speaker 2 (23:21):
I don't. It turns on the day you ask me.
Speaker 3 (23:23):
Yeah, I don't want to know.
Speaker 2 (23:25):
Because I don't mind knowing something. But some days I'd
be like, oh, I don't want to know. Other days
I'd be like, oh, definitely, I may relieve the pressure.
Speaker 3 (23:31):
I feel like. It's also for the like I don't
want like a ring camera at my front door.
Speaker 2 (23:35):
Yeah, that's a little different.
Speaker 3 (23:37):
Okay, because like around here, if someone brings into your house,
you can give the cops the footage. It doesn't do anything.
Speaker 2 (23:42):
That doesn't mean anything. But if a psychic tells you
doesn't necessarily.
Speaker 3 (23:45):
But it's also like, but if I saw someone prowling
around my yard but nothing happened, I don't want to know.
I rather live in bliss.
Speaker 2 (23:51):
You like that the bliss. I'm full of bliss there.
Speaker 3 (23:55):
So she would never she would never do that tell
people she knew, Yeah, she would, she would never tell
anyone the answer. She did do a couple exorcisms, but
only a few of them because, like she said, they
were super super difficult, and it was a very special thing.
Speaker 2 (24:09):
You also have to worry about that the imagine taking
on some dark alga.
Speaker 3 (24:12):
She said. One of them left burn marks on her knees,
but there was no fire.
Speaker 2 (24:16):
Just from the friction of like praying so hard, Saren.
Speaker 3 (24:18):
It was really spooky. Neighbors, Oh, was that what you
were doing?
Speaker 2 (24:24):
Maria? So uh, I'm not going to say.
Speaker 3 (24:28):
Sometime in the mid eighties she sold her name. But
what you mean, It's like around nineteen eighty five a
trademark for the commercial use of the name Maria Duval
was issued in France.
Speaker 2 (24:39):
She passed it on like Gallagher.
Speaker 3 (24:40):
Yeah, and it's like Menudo. It's unclear or unknown if
Maria took this out herself or if it was because
of her early dealings with the businessmen who would later
run her empire. And later there were other similar trademarks
taken out all over the world. So who are those businessmen?
Speaker 2 (24:58):
Who are those businessmen?
Speaker 3 (24:59):
Thank you for asking? Jacques Mail and Jean Claude Reel
for real, And so they reached out to her about
using her name for a mailing campaign for their business.
And you know, she's super well known as a psychic
in France, Yeah, market her powers, and according to her
(25:20):
son Antoine, she was dazzled by these guys and the offer,
and she didn't really read the contract. She was like, perfect,
I'll do it. And she said, you know, for the
first decade that we worked together, things were fine.
Speaker 2 (25:32):
That's good in business, ten years.
Speaker 3 (25:33):
Ten years, but greed always rears its ugly head, and
that's when things got bad. At first, the business only
sold astrology charts, but later their business model changed to letters,
and so the contract was structured in a way that
she couldn't get out of it. So she's really the
con men's first victim. As part of her contract, she
(25:54):
had to do press and touring, and this was so
people could see that she was a real person, and
it took her all over Europe and beyond and beyond.
In two thousand and eight, she spoke in Moscow at
the Central House of Journalists where she forecasted the future
of Russia. And apparently as part of this, seven hundred
(26:15):
thousand apple trees were planted near Moscow and all named
Maria duval I. Have no idea why or what.
Speaker 2 (26:24):
That means, what it, what does.
Speaker 3 (26:26):
It have to do with it? That's a lot of trees.
That's a lot of apple apples.
Speaker 2 (26:33):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (26:34):
So anyway, Maria Duvall letters, as you can probably guess,
they evolved into a scam.
Speaker 2 (26:41):
Yeah, I'm guessing.
Speaker 3 (26:43):
The letter scam is considered one of the world's longest
running cons. Her letter scam in particular is considered one
of the longest running cons in the whole wide world.
It's taken place all over this this beautiful globe, including US, Canada, Denmark,
and Russia, Norway, New Zealand, Finland, Japan, Australia. I could
go on.
Speaker 2 (27:04):
Worldwide sattle down.
Speaker 3 (27:06):
In the beginning, they started with like newspaper ads and
they wouldn't mention Maria Duvall. Well, they were supposed to
be research studies and they would ask readers to send
in personal details like their zodiac sign, the time of
their birth, their marital status, in exchange to win a
lot of money. And you remember how it feels like,
you know, in the eighties, there would always be those
(27:27):
mailers to your house with like fill out this consumer question.
So they didn't even bother sending them. They just put
it as an ad in the paper, tell us about you,
and people like okay, sure, and so the conment took
this information and they used it to create profiles, and
then they crossed referenced it with information purchased from data
brokers and two other kinds of lists. They had a
(27:47):
look alike list, which a list of new names and
addresses of people who look in demographics wise like the
current customer base.
Speaker 2 (27:56):
And it's similar to what you're talking about.
Speaker 3 (27:59):
Yeah, doppelganger list.
Speaker 2 (28:00):
This guy looks like you got it, see kid, it's great.
It looks like deb Winger.
Speaker 3 (28:06):
And then there was a shop a like list, so
people who bought similar things as the victims. So they
were just like building these huge profiles. Then the next
part of the scam starts. The victim they get letters
from a French psychic named Maria Duval just out of nowhere,
Clayton Gerber of the US Postal Inspection Services quote. These
would be printed via mail merge, so your name would
(28:28):
appear throughout. These were multi page letters, six or eight
or ten pages long. They would have graphics like they
have changes in font and they would have marginal notes
to make it look like if your eyesight wasn't great,
it would look like somebody had written a handwritten note
on the side of it. They they appeared to be
very personalized, like the letter was written directly to you,
like this was a friend writing to you. And many
(28:50):
people wrote back, yeah, I like that if your eyesight
isn't great. So it's like if I opened it up
and I'd be like, oh yeah, oh look they wrote.
Speaker 2 (28:58):
Me a note, all these little notes on the side.
Speaker 3 (29:01):
Some of the letters even had a fake coffee cup
stain on the paper to make it look more authentic.
Speaker 2 (29:06):
Wow.
Speaker 3 (29:07):
And I guess a lot of people who got the
letters didn't remember filling out the original questionnaire.
Speaker 2 (29:13):
Time past I'm sure.
Speaker 3 (29:14):
Yeah, and well while they run all the list.
Speaker 2 (29:16):
Yeah, you wouldn't think that you'd be.
Speaker 3 (29:17):
And so there was all this personal information and the
personalized letters. They seemed like proof of Maria's abilities. So,
for example, she'd say, you are mainly under the influence
of venus in addition to being born on May twenty second,
nineteen twenty seven, in Kansas City at twelve pm. I
can already see some aspects of your personality. So if
you're just getting this, what you think is just a
(29:39):
cold letter, like that's crazy.
Speaker 2 (29:40):
But she already knows that you like you know broken
for cheese. She's like mentioning it by Tiede. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (29:46):
Here are some more excerpts. Quote two internationally renowned mediums
have predicted what your future holds. The news is fantastic.
Note these four things that are very important to you.
April second, twenty fourteen, Winnings problems solved, Like are you
kidding me? To celebrate your new life, we have prepared
(30:08):
a mysterious and extraordinary gift, a powerful talisman who can
attract money and chance. It's the same talisman that Patrick
Gren wears with him at all times. He never shared it,
but in your case, he didn't. Hesitates Patrick Gwren is
another cycle.
Speaker 2 (30:24):
Sure, like a you're a Geller type whatever.
Speaker 3 (30:27):
And then quote if you've got a special bottle of
Bubbly that you've been saving for celebrating great news, then
now's the time to open it.
Speaker 2 (30:34):
I feel so bad for the people who fall victim
to this.
Speaker 3 (30:37):
Oh my god.
Speaker 2 (30:39):
It's easier for me to always deal with people who
fall victim to a con man because they actively want
to try to like get over on somebody else. Like
I like, I don't mind those so much because it's like, oh,
you tried to get greedy. He thought you could be
on the inside. You thought you could be on the
All of a sudden, somebody turned it on. You're like,
oh no, and you can't even go to the cops.
Speaker 3 (30:55):
Right of counterfeit money machines exactly.
Speaker 2 (30:58):
But like putting a fake ring on and notes on
the side, so people with poor eyesight are confused. I
now know who they're trying to hit. It's mostly old people. Yeah,
you know, it's like and old people who have some
belief in the world, Like, come on on the way out,
you're going to kick them a couple of times and
take those all.
Speaker 3 (31:12):
Horrible anyway, There's this Canadian magazine, The Walrus. They wrote
quote some correspondence directed recipients to purchase supposedly supernatural objects,
while others urged them to use provided green envelopes to
mail personal items, family photographs, palm prints, locks of hair
against a promise that the psychic would use them to
conduct personalized rituals. Once this envelope has been sealed, it
(31:35):
may be only opened by me. Read one letter that
included Duval's photocopied signature. So sometimes the money request would
come only after they responded. Maria would offer more help,
but if they pay, And according to the Postal inspector
Gerber quote, the ask was always for twenty thirty forty dollars.
In return, you might get some sort of tiny trinket,
(31:57):
some sort of little talisman, some sort of newsletter. You
always got another solicitation. You always got another letter that
was a personalized plea asking for more money. And then
there was an escalation of some sixty seventy eighty different letters.
It was a progression. You paid on letter one, you
got letter two, you paid on letter two, you got
letter three. And it was always an ask for money.
Speaker 2 (32:18):
Confuse, are we talking about American political parties? This is
like the emails you get from Oh my God, always
maybe at trinket.
Speaker 3 (32:27):
Here's a bumper sticker. So those talisman trinkets cheap plastic
trinkets mass produced in China. Or it was a quote
vibratory crystal that they described as quote they are wrenched
from the mountains by volcanic eruptions and erosion, falling into
rivers where they are sought for their beauty and their powers.
The crystal is a living stone that has a heart,
(32:48):
a sort of atomic battery with the power to harness
and redirect energy. This pure energy can channel your thoughts
and then change the course of events. As soon as
you wear your vibratory crystal, your mind instantly sharpens and
you feel your energy level surge. Nothing can stand in
your way. You are going to find it easy to
harness that strength to get whatever you want from life
(33:10):
and resolve all your problems.
Speaker 2 (33:12):
Of course, I mean, just put the crystal, the vibratory crystal.
Maybe they're getting like I'm sure these crystals from like
Kazakhstan for like you know, a one ton for five
francs or whatever and then just handing them out. But like,
other than the fact that there are a lot of
people who can point out stuff about like oh crystals
and rocks and that will do some things, you know,
Like but I like how this stuff is always like
it's going to do everything. It's gonna it's gonna fix
(33:34):
your whole life. Might just totally. It could just make
you feel little better, it might orient some energies or whatever. Nope,
they're like, no, this one's going to file your totally.
Speaker 3 (33:43):
So between nineteen ninety four and twenty fourteen, the scam
earned more than one hundred and seventy five million US
dollars from the US and Canada and uh.
Speaker 2 (33:53):
Over the crazy such a small ass.
Speaker 3 (33:55):
Yeah, some got up to like thousands of thousands that
they were handing over. Others had her on their an
old Christmas card.
Speaker 2 (34:01):
It's got to be so many people who follow evict
him to this to get to those numbers.
Speaker 3 (34:04):
Oh, completely, And so let's learn about these two con
men please. Jean Claude Reel was a Swiss businessman and
Jacques Mallard French marketing genius so real he had experienced
in the mail order world. He sold like painkiller bracelets
and a device that instantly ages wine shoe and steps
(34:25):
that help you lose weight and so earlier in.
Speaker 2 (34:30):
His bracelet makes your hair grow back.
Speaker 3 (34:32):
He had been into like UFO stuff earlier in his life. Yeah.
And then he also owned a company called Infojest, the
mail or her company. Yeah, infojest, but with a g
okay jest. Yeah, and so they that was the company
behind the scam Infojest. When CNN tracked him down in
twenty fourteen, Reel told the journalists that while he had
(34:53):
once owned Infojest, he hadn't been involved in many many
years he retired in two thousand and six. Total lies,
not true all And he said he kind of only
knew Maria casually at that time. Mayon, the marketing guy,
you know, he's the one who kind of just connected
the dots.
Speaker 2 (35:11):
He's friends.
Speaker 3 (35:11):
She knew about Maria and France and like, you know,
connected it all over.
Speaker 2 (35:15):
So I've heard of her. I knew people that might
want to know her.
Speaker 3 (35:18):
So they have this Infojess that's in the in North America.
But then they had like a Swiss subsidiary. They had
them all over the world. They're doing this in other countries,
other languages. But here's like, here's an example for North America.
Infojest Direct Marketing wrote and designed the letters, and then
a Canadian company, a different company, printed and addressed them
and then shipped them to a company in Albany, New York,
(35:41):
where they were mailed out in bulk, and then any
responses were sent to commercial mailboxes owned by a Hong
Kong based company called Destiny Research Center, and then those
were gathered and sent to another company, Data Marketing Group
on Long Island.
Speaker 2 (35:55):
Back to America. Uh huh interesting.
Speaker 3 (35:57):
Long Island zaren Yes, Long Island. Yeah, In Long Island. Yes,
I want you to picture picture Long Island. It's your
first day on the job at Data Marketing Group in
Deer Park, New York. You used to work at the
coals at the shopping center down the street, but a
friend clued you in on this gig. You'll be working
in the mailroom, processing letters sent in from customers. That's
(36:18):
what they told you. You're in a five story building
that houses the First National Bank of Long Island. On
the ground floor for blocks on either side of you
or single level office park type places, HVAC companies, etc.
You're being walked around the offices by a guy named Franco.
He wears a big bluetooth earpiece and absolutely stinks of cologne.
He's showing you the cubicles where people type lazily or
(36:40):
talk on the phone. You can't hear what they're saying.
You pass a room with two long tables. A bunch
of women sit along the tables, some scanning checks in
the machine, others running currency through speed counters. They all
wear the same blue polo shirts and latex clubs. No
one looks up as you poke your heavyloone. Franco tells
you that This is the cash room. They process all
of the payments received. He tells you they run about
(37:01):
five hundred thousand dollars every two weeks. You whistle, that's
a lot of money. You ask Franco what people are
buying services? He tells you. As you walk down the
gray carpeted hallway, its short nap showing where from years
of office workers trudging back and forth. You ask Franco
exactly what she'll be doing. Let's watch and you can learn,
he says. He takes you to a large room with
us mail bins stacked along a wall, tons of them.
(37:24):
A man stands at a counter that runs down the
center of the room. A tinny radio plays quietly in
the corner of the room, kerky classical music, competing with
Uhammad the air conditioning system. The man pulls letters from
the mail bin next to him on a cart his
latex love hands expertly using a small letter opener to
slice a on the envelope. You watch as he extracts
a piece of paper, a photo, and a checked He
(37:44):
scans the letter and tosses it into a hole in
the counter. He glances at the photo and tosses it
into that same hole. Then he looks at the check
and carefully places it into a tray in front of him.
Stacks the checks filled a tray. He puts the envelope
into another tray. He opens another letter, this time a
large Manila enflop. He pulls out sheets and sheets of
paper with feeble scrawl filling the page and slanted lines.
(38:05):
He scans the text and tosses it into the hole.
Then he pulls out what looks to be a lock
of hair ough Franco mutters. The man at the counter
looks over at you two and rolls his eyes. Then
he shrugs and unceremoniously tosses the hair in the hole.
Then he reaches into the Manilla envelope and pulls out
a stack of cash, held together with a bunch of
old crackled rubber bands and yellows and tans and pinks.
(38:26):
He places the cash into a strong box next to
the check tray and puts the Manilla envelope in the
other tray. Franco turns to you and claps you on
the shoulder. He tells you he thinks you've got it
figured out. That Philip there will answer any questions you
may have. He tells you that your lunch break is
at eleven forty five. Then he turns and walks away
down the hall. Let's take a break. Yeah, I have
to split this one up.
Speaker 2 (38:47):
It's a lunch break.
Speaker 3 (38:48):
Lunch break eleven forty five. All right, when we come back,
we'll get back on the scene. All right, Zarin, we're
(39:13):
in Long Island.
Speaker 2 (39:14):
I'm still enjoying your stunch break. Yeah, I come back
for your lunch break.
Speaker 3 (39:18):
Okay. So you head into the mail room with Philip,
and you stand at the counter opposite of him. The
two of you introduce yourselves and he tells you to
wheel a mail bin over on the cart and get started.
He tells you to put on some gloves from the
box on the table in the corner, and then he
tells you to start opening the mail. Pull out the
letter if there is one, read through it and make
sure there's no credit card or bank information written on it.
(39:40):
Then toss it in the hole. Look for any pictures
or mementos or little gifts, toss those in the hole. Two.
Then pull out any money, cash, check, money order, whatever,
and place it in the appropriate tray or box. He
tells you someone will come by every hour to empty
the trays. Oh, and there are cameras up in the
corners by the ceiling, so don't try any funny business.
Then you got to put the envelope and the envelope tray,
so you track the names and addresses. You grab your
(40:02):
first envelope and get to work. You use the little
tool to slice it open. It holds a short letter
on a note card, which you read over quickly. It's
asking someone named Maria for help. They want to know
if their daughter will ever come home. Apparently she went
missing when she was six. That was twelve years ago.
There's a photo too, a gap tooth little girl and pigtail,
smiles up at the camera, the sun in her eyes.
I put these in the hole. You ask Philip yep,
(40:24):
he tells you. You ask him how everything gets filed
when it's all jumbled in the bin under the hole.
That's the trash man, he tells you. A guy comes
by every couple of hours to empty it out, goes
out to the dumpster. Photos, swatches of clothing, locks of
hair thrown away. You feel sick. You take the check
that was in the envelope. Two hundred and fifty dollars
and place it in the empty tray in front of you.
(40:45):
You stare at it for a bit, and then you
turn and walk out of the room. You head straight
for the elevators and go out to your car and
drive home. Third one this month, Philip mutters to himself
as he slices open another envelope of desperation.
Speaker 2 (40:57):
Oh my god, my heart breaks. I just want to
go fight these frenchmen.
Speaker 3 (41:01):
Right.
Speaker 2 (41:01):
Oh my god, knuckle up, Come on, Frank.
Speaker 3 (41:04):
Now that I've bummed you out the day at Data marketing,
processing payments, this is why I can't write that book.
Would you say it does that?
Speaker 2 (41:12):
When you said that circular hole, I was like, that's
gonna be the circular file the screenplays go into. I
know this.
Speaker 3 (41:19):
So remember Maria was in name only, was saying that
the personal items would help with the readings. Oh my god,
folks at Data Marketing, just throw them away. Enter Patrice Runner.
Speaker 2 (41:29):
All right, he's Runner.
Speaker 3 (41:30):
He's the main man on this whole info just stuff
in North America. Oh yeah, So he met up in
the eighties night you know, late eighties, early nineties with
Mayo and Real and the Maria Duvalscan was up and
running in Europe at that point, and he's like, I'm
from Canada. Let's do North America.
Speaker 2 (41:47):
Got you?
Speaker 3 (41:48):
So he goes out to France wants to meet Maria
and then get the rights to do North America. And
she did a reading on him and is then girlfriend.
They're convinced she's the real deal.
Speaker 2 (41:58):
Huh.
Speaker 3 (41:58):
So he does. He's the one who starts the North
America Maria Duval direct Malee, Okay.
Speaker 2 (42:03):
He's like, I got a big market of suckers.
Speaker 3 (42:05):
Yeah, and he's got the blessing of Mayon and Real
of course, who were just soaking Europe at this time.
Speaker 2 (42:10):
Oh my goodness.
Speaker 3 (42:11):
So he gives Duval a five percent royalty and I'm
sure he's kicking up to Mayon and Real, but Duval's
five percent royalty was several hundred thousand dollars a year.
That's how much money. And so he you know, he
does the ads in the newspaper, and he was writing
his own copy at first, and then he started hiring copywriters.
Imagine getting that job of writing these letters.
Speaker 2 (42:32):
I mean, yes and no, Like it's one of those
ones like I totally think it'll be fun, until I
realized what I was doing and then I absolutely hate it.
Speaker 3 (42:38):
Like he was pulling in like for on the first day.
Speaker 2 (42:41):
Yeah, he was.
Speaker 3 (42:43):
Pulling in for him, like twenty three million a year,
and he lived in he had he lived in Whistler,
Costa Rica, Switzerland, Paris, Ibiza, and he and his family
traveled all over because like he doesn't have to do anything,
it's on autopilot. Between twenty six and twenty fourteen, his
company sent out at least fifty six million Maria Duval letters.
Speaker 2 (43:06):
How are there that many people calling for the.
Speaker 3 (43:09):
He did like ab testing between different versions of the letter,
so he would like test him out on groups of
fifty thousand to see which had more people respond according
to AARP, which you know they were like their bat
signal went off.
Speaker 2 (43:21):
Oh yeah.
Speaker 3 (43:21):
Federal investigators estimate the scam impacted one in three hundred Americans,
about one point four million victims, and raked in over
two hundred million dollars, with a similar proportion in Canada.
Speaker 2 (43:33):
That's a lot.
Speaker 3 (43:34):
One in three hundred. US Postal inspectors. They start getting
complaints around two thousand and six. In two thousand and seven,
the US Postal Inspectors they filed a cease and desist
order against Maria Duval, Patrese Runner, and then others, including
a company called Zodiac Zone.
Speaker 2 (43:50):
That sounds like such nonsense.
Speaker 4 (43:52):
I know.
Speaker 3 (43:52):
I don't know if runners or if it's a different
partner in the scam. It just it gets really murky,
get thrown in there.
Speaker 2 (43:59):
Oh yeah.
Speaker 3 (44:00):
A settlement was negotiated and the individuals named agreed to
cease operations. Zodiac Zone just changed its name and continued
to do business as usual.
Speaker 2 (44:09):
Using the same male system.
Speaker 4 (44:11):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (44:11):
Everything just now we're like Bodiac Bone.
Speaker 2 (44:14):
I don't know.
Speaker 3 (44:15):
And although Patre's Runner was one of the people originally sued,
his lawyers negotiated to later have his name removed from
the lawsuit, arguing that he'd already left the business and
had nothing to do with the scam. That is a
complete lie, totally involved. The FTC already knew about Runner
in nineteen ninety seven. They reached out to him to
(44:35):
verify claims in an ad that he was running for
Svelt Patch. Svelt Patch it was a skin patch that
was supposed to melt away body fat. What Yeah, and
if you can believe it, Zarin, he didn't have any
proof that Svelt Patch would actually help people drop pounds,
what is not crazy? So his company was ordered to
pay the FTC three hundred and seventy five thousand dollars,
(44:57):
mainly to pay back the people who bought the pack.
Speaker 2 (45:00):
Okay, that was go around what he had made. So
it wasn't like he made seven million and had to
pay three hundreds. I don't operating costs.
Speaker 3 (45:07):
Yeah, I don't know what his full hall was. I'm
praying that that was.
Speaker 2 (45:10):
Like helping this restitution.
Speaker 3 (45:11):
A few years later, the FEDS tried again, according to
that book, a Deal with the Devil. In twenty fourteen,
USPIS Inspector Thomas Ninen was looking into a different fraud
when he saw an alarming number of withdrawal requests were
being denied for payments to one business in particular with
an intriguing name, Destiny Research Center, a company registered in
(45:31):
Hong Kong. So twenty fourteen, the Department of Justice filed
a lawsuit against Duval and Patrick Gurrin, the other psychic,
and so the lawsuit temporarily prevented Data Marketing Group. That's
where you were working for a little bit.
Speaker 2 (45:46):
Of course, how could I forget.
Speaker 3 (45:47):
And info just direct marketing runners company in Montreal, Montreal
from sending out letters to the US. Three Info Just
Canada employees were named, but not Runner, who avoided being
named in the lawsuit.
Speaker 2 (46:00):
Yeah good lawyer.
Speaker 3 (46:01):
Runner said that he didn't know the envelopes filled with
hair and photos weren't being sent to Duval in France.
I know harro photos, but that's one hundred percent falls
he set.
Speaker 2 (46:09):
The whole thing up, is his organization. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (46:12):
Twenty sixteen, the lawsuits settled. None of the eight defendants,
including Duval and Garren, admitted guilt, but they were all
barred from sending letters in the United States.
Speaker 2 (46:21):
And none of this was any letters, I guess because
they're not promising anything.
Speaker 3 (46:25):
I don't know, but there's like hank money involved, I
don't know. Twenty eighteen, the US Postal Inspector and other
US government officials came to Maria's house in southern France,
like that's a junket. But at this point she had
like really advanced and.
Speaker 2 (46:40):
Mess Yeah, she's like out of it entire I mean
she's aged.
Speaker 3 (46:45):
So they didn't learn much, but they got a trip
to the South France courtesy of Uncle Sam.
Speaker 2 (46:48):
I like to see postal carriers out there.
Speaker 3 (46:50):
Exactly. However, you know they're facing potential criminal charges. Some
Infojest employees helped the US government in charges against Runner,
maybe Philip in the mail room Runner was charged. Runner
was charged in absentia in twenty eighteen. In twenty twenty,
he was located living in a tent on the beach
(47:13):
in Ibatza.
Speaker 4 (47:14):
What.
Speaker 3 (47:14):
Yeah, his wife had left him and kicked him out.
Oh my god, and he had no money. This is
beautifully living. He was arrested and extradited back to the
US in the fall.
Speaker 2 (47:26):
Of twenty So he wasn't doing like an ayahuasca cleanse.
He was just beat town broke. He was with bad
facial hair, hanging out in the tent.
Speaker 3 (47:36):
In June of twenty twenty three, he was found guilty
of fourteen counts of mail and wire fraud. There it is.
He faces up to twenty years in prison per count.
But he's still a waiting sentencing.
Speaker 2 (47:48):
Oh, he going to get it.
Speaker 3 (47:48):
Yeah. He has maintained that while what he did may
not have been moral, it wasn't fraud.
Speaker 2 (47:53):
Oh my god. That's a terrible I know.
Speaker 3 (47:56):
And that magazine The Walrus, they said. In his trial,
his lawyers argued that quote, psychic services are inherently misleading
and therefore could not be fraud.
Speaker 2 (48:05):
Oh yeah, yeah, that's actually a very interesting argument. Look,
everybody knows, they knows, so if you fall for it,
I mean, come on, but you know.
Speaker 3 (48:13):
And a bit of good news because the uspis settled
with the data broker for one hundred and twenty seven
point five million what they were able to pay back
many of Maria's victims.
Speaker 2 (48:24):
Oh that's the least good. Yeah, there's something there, like
they get some sense of justice Financially, I'm still hung
up on the throwing out the pictures and the little
bits of talismanic juice that these people are sending over there.
Speaker 3 (48:39):
The little bits of hope.
Speaker 2 (48:40):
Yes, I just I hope that the Postal Service is
able to actually get them all on these charges. And
I'm not somebody who's like, yeah, throw them away and
lock them up, throw away the key and all that. No. No,
but seriously, for these guys, well, I think under the prison, I.
Speaker 3 (48:56):
Don't know where real is. Myom has passed away, but anyway,
they're horrible, and I hope all bad things happen here.
Speaker 2 (49:03):
We take some money from his I'm not going to
come out to his family.
Speaker 3 (49:08):
Captain d give me a talk back. God, I went cheat.
Speaker 4 (49:23):
Hey, Elizabeth hay Saren, longtime listener, first time color so
I just want to say thank you for bringing me
laughs near like every week. I started listening to these
by myself, but when you got got to the Cocaine Bear,
I just had to share it with my dad. So
(49:44):
thanks to bringing us both laughter. Have a good day. Bye,
hey again. Also, I would so buy a Sandalwood University
T shirt, just saying please.
Speaker 1 (49:59):
Do those right.
Speaker 2 (50:02):
Yes, the dreamcatch.
Speaker 3 (50:04):
I like how Cocaine Bear brings families together.
Speaker 2 (50:08):
Really beautiful, so beautiful. Thank you so much.
Speaker 3 (50:13):
Good job for bringing that into this world. That's all
I have for today. You can find us online at
ridiculous Crime dot com. We're also on the internet. Email
us at ridiculous Crime at gmail dot com, and please
leave a talk back on the iHeart app. We love
those reach out reach out. Ridiculous Crime is hosted by
(50:38):
Elizabeth Dutton and Sarah Burnett, produced and edited by cash
Room supervisor Dave Cousten. Research is by Madame Marissa Brown,
Psychic to the Stars and Zodiac enthusiast, and by that
I mean the rafts Andrea song Sharpen Tear. The theme
song is by mail order. Empresarios Thomas Lee and Travis Dutton.
Post wardrobe is provided by Botany five hundred. Guest hair
(51:00):
and makeup provided by Sparkleshot and Mister Andre. Executive producers
are Missing Hiker, Ben Bollen and Crystal Ballwaxer Nol Brown.
Speaker 1 (51:13):
Ridicous Crime Say It One More Timequeous cry Ridiculous Crime
is a production of iHeartRadio four more podcasts. My heart Radio,
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.
Hosts And Creators
Zaron Burnett
Elizabeth Dutton
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