The Justice Department prosecuted the printer
In April 2025 the owner of a Las Vegas printing and mailing business pleaded guilty to conspiracy over her part in producing millions of fraudulent prize notices between 2012 and 2018, in a scheme that took more than $15 million. She did not write the letters or take the money. She supervised the lasering, printing and mailing.
- Year
- 2025
- Where
- United States
- Outcome
- Convicted
- Reported loss
- $15.0 million
- Victims
- Not stated in the sources
- Schemes
- Mass-mailing and psychic letter fraud, Prize, lottery and sweepstakes scams
- Last reviewed
- 2026-09-06
The facts, as recorded
- The Justice Department announced the guilty plea on 28 April 2025.
- Barbara Trickle, 80, of Las Vegas, owned and operated a printing and mailing business.
- She supervised the lasering, printing and mailing of the fraudulent mailings, and her business produced the deceptive prize notices used in the scheme.
- The operation involved millions of fraudulent prize notices distributed across the United States and internationally.
- More than $15 million was stolen through the scheme.
- The scheme ran from 2012 to February 2018.
- She pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit mail and wire fraud.
Why this case matters
She did not write the letters. She did not receive the payments. She did not choose who was targeted.
She printed and posted them, and the Justice Department prosecuted her for it.
That is the most useful thing on this page, because it identifies where this kind of fraud is actually vulnerable. Mass-mailing fraud is not one person with a laser printer. It is an industry with a supply chain — list brokers who sell names, printers who produce the notices, mailing houses who lodge them with the post, and payment processors who take the fees — and each of those links is an ordinary business that could refuse.
What the charge rests on
Not that she posted things. That she supervised the lasering, printing and mailing of mailings the government says were fraudulent, over six years, while her business produced the deceptive prize notices at the centre of the scheme.
The distinction matters: a printer who takes a job in good faith is a supplier; a printer who keeps producing millions of notices for the same operation for six years is charged with conspiracy.
Why the supply chain is the pressure point
The people who design these schemes are frequently offshore, and frequently very hard to reach — the psychic mailing case required an arrest in Spain and an extradition that took two years.
The printer is in Las Vegas. The mailing house has a loading bay. The list broker has an office. All of them are domestic, findable, and — unlike the operators — dependent on being able to do business openly.
Prosecuting them does two things at once: it removes capacity that is genuinely hard to replace at scale, and it changes the risk calculation for every other supplier who is asked to print something that looks like this.
The age of the defendant
Barbara Trickle was 80.
We record it because it is in the source and because it cuts against the shape people expect. This is a scheme aimed overwhelmingly at older victims, prosecuted in this instance against an older defendant, and the two facts have nothing to do with each other. Age is a targeting criterion here, not a characteristic of the people running it.
Sources
- Nevada Printer and Mailer Pleads Guilty to Participating in Elder Fraud Scheme. US Department of Justice. Accessed 2026-09-06. Supports: The 28 April 2025 plea, the defendant and her business, her role supervising the lasering, printing and mailing, the millions of notices, the $15m stolen, the 2012 to February 2018 period and the charge.
- Federal Jury Convicts Florida Resident for Operating Mass Mailing Fraud Scheme Targeting Elderly and Vulnerable Victims. US Department of Justice. Accessed 2026-09-06. Supports: The parallel prosecution of the mailers themselves in the same enforcement line.