A Denver man was sentenced to 60 months in prison, followed by two years of supervised release, for orchestrating a $300 million nationwide telemarketing fraud scheme and committing tax evasion, the U.S. Attorney’s Office, District of Minnesota announced today.
Henry Aragon, 54, of Golden, Colorado, was also ordered to pay $19,051,667 in restitution to the victims of his fraud scheme and $1,490,011 to the IRS in his tax evasion case, according to court documents.
For more than a decade, Aragon devised and participated in a large, nationwide telemarketing fraud scheme involving magazine subscription sales, the department reports.
Aragon and his co-defendants conspired to defraud over 150,000 consumers across the country, many of whom were older or vulnerable to fraud, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.
The department states that the scheme involved dozens of fraudulent magazine sales companies operating across the United States and Canada.
These companies ran telemarketing call centers where employees used deceptive sales scripts to mislead consumers into making large or repeated payments, the department reports.