Mass-mailing fraud sends millions of near-identical letters that read as personal — a psychic's vision about you, or a prize you have been specially chosen for — and asks a modest fee to release it. US prosecutors have convicted operators, and separately the printers and mailers who produced the letters. One scheme ran from 1994 to 2014.
A letter arrives. It has your name on it, and it is about you.
A psychic has had a vision concerning your future and wants to share what she saw. Or you have been specifically chosen to receive a large cash prize, which will be released on payment of a modest fee.
Tens of thousands of other people got the same letter that week.
This is the oldest scheme on this site and one of the most durable. One operation ran from 1994 to November 2014 — twenty years — sending letters that purported to come from the psychics Maria Duval and Patrick Guerin. Another mailed millions of prize notices in 21 months.
The reason it lasts is worth stating plainly: nobody moderates an envelope. There is no platform to report it to, no domain registrar, no host, no account to suspend and no spam filter to pass. The letter is delivered by the state, and borrows a little credibility from that.
Bought from a broker. The valuable names are people who have replied to postal solicitations before, because a reply is evidence that somebody reads their post and acts on it.
Lasered, printed and posted by an ordinary printing business. In one case the owner of that business was prosecuted after six years of producing them.
A vision concerning you specifically. A prize you alone have been selected for. The personal detail is written to be true of almost anyone: a recent difficulty, a decision ahead, a change coming.
Small enough to risk on the chance it is real, and framed as releasing something already yours rather than buying anything.
Where it could have stopped
No legitimate prize requires a payment to release it, and nothing individually foreseen about you arrives in an envelope sent to tens of thousands of people that week. A fee to receive money is the whole tell — on paper exactly as on the telephone.
A response is recorded. A payment is recorded far more valuably, because a proven payer is the most sought-after name in this trade.
Prosecutors record victims making dozens of payments to a single scheme. The escalation is the business model, not a separate fraud.
No platform generates reports in real time. These cases are charged after the mailings have stopped, on evidence gathered by postal inspectors and from victims who eventually told somebody.
Paper is credible in a way email is not. Everyone has been trained to distrust an unexpected email. Almost nobody has been trained to distrust an unexpected letter, and a physical envelope carries an implication of cost and effort that a message does not.
It selects for isolation, not for stupidity. The psychic version in particular is written for someone who would like to be told that a person has thought about them. That is not a failure of judgement; it is loneliness, addressed commercially.
The fee is small and framed as a release. Twenty or forty dollars to unlock something already promised is a different decision from spending twenty or forty dollars.
The arithmetic does not need most people. Millions of notices producing thousands of victims is a response rate well under one per cent — and entirely viable, because printing is cheap and responders pay repeatedly.
Replying is the trap, not paying. Every response refines a list, and the lists are sold. A person who answers one letter receives many.
And there is nobody to complain to. The absence of a platform is the structural advantage, and it is why the enforcement that exists comes from postal inspectors rather than from takedowns.
An international trade with a domestic supply chain — and prosecutors have gone after both halves, which is unusual enough to be the most interesting thing about this scheme.
The operators are frequently abroad. The psychic mailing scheme was run by a French and Canadian citizen, arrested in Ibiza in December 2018 and extradited to the United States two years later, in December 2020. The entities involved were National Parapsychology Center, Zodiac Zone, Destiny Research Group and Destiny Research Center — several official-sounding names over one operation, the same pattern as every other scheme on this site.
The supply chain is not. The list broker has an office. The printer has a loading bay. The mailing house lodges the sacks with the post office. All of them are findable, and all of them depend on being able to do business openly.
So in April 2025 the Justice Department obtained a guilty plea from the owner of a Las Vegas printing and mailing business — who did not write the letters, did not choose the targets and did not receive the payments, but supervised the lasering, printing and mailing of millions of fraudulent prize notices over six years, in a scheme that took more than $15 million.
That is the pressure point. Reaching an operator requires an extradition; reaching the printer requires a subpoena, and it removes capacity that is genuinely hard to replace at scale.
And there is a dedicated investigator. Mail fraud is a federal offence with the US Postal Inspection Service attached to it, prosecuted by the Justice Department’s Consumer Protection Branch, with maximum sentences of 20 years per count. Very few schemes on this site have an agency whose specific job is the medium they travel through — which is why the paper version of prize fraud has a markedly better enforcement record than the telephone version.
A federal jury convicted Phillip Priolo in March 2025 over a scheme that mailed millions of prize notices falsely telling recipients they had been specifically chosen for a large cash prize, which they would receive on payment of a fee. Thousands of victims, many of them elderly, over 21 months.
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.
Patrice Runner ran a mass-mailing scheme from 1994 to November 2014, sending millions of letters that purported to be personal messages from the psychics Maria Duval and Patrick Guerin, offering wealth and happiness for a fee. Nearly identical letters went to tens of thousands of people a week. He was convicted in June 2023 on fourteen counts.
Do not reply at all. Not to decline, not to ask to be removed, not to return the envelope. A reply is the thing being harvested, and a “remove me” response confirms the address is live and read.
Throw it away, or keep it as evidence and throw the reply envelope away.
If money has been sent.
If it is happening to a relative.
Ask to see the post, gently and without making it a confrontation — shame is what keeps this hidden, and the letters are designed to feel like a private correspondence rather than an advertisement.
Register them with the mail preference service in your country, and ask the post office what can be refused. But the effective intervention is the same one that matters everywhere on this site: someone else knows, and the letters stop being answered in private.
Small fees, paid repeatedly, through the least remarkable financial plumbing on this site.
Payments arrive as cheques and card payments handled by caging and payment processing operations — businesses whose ordinary job is opening reply mail, banking the cheques and reconciling the responses. From there money passes through several trading entities and on to an operator who is often outside the country.
Nothing about any individual transaction is unusual. Each fee is too small to query, and the entities have real bank accounts. What links them is the mailing pattern rather than the payments — which is why the money laundering count in the psychic mailing case was charged alongside the fraud counts, and why the evidence came from postal inspectors rather than from a bank.
The other asset is the one that survives everything: the list. Names, addresses, response history and payment history. It outlives the operation, it is sold on, and it is why a person who paid a psychic letter in 2012 was still receiving mail long after the scheme that took the money had been shut down.
The other half of this story
Our sibling site Clean on Paper explains why one operation needs several entities — and why a chain of ordinary companies is harder to unpick than a single dishonest one.
The same rule as every prize scam, in a different medium: no legitimate prize requires a payment to release it. And nothing individually foreseen about you arrives in an envelope that went to tens of thousands of other people that week.
Names and addresses come from purchased lists, and the personal detail is written to be true of almost anyone — a recent difficulty, a decision you are facing, a change coming. Prosecutors describe nearly identical letters sent to tens of thousands of people weekly, each claiming a personalised vision.
Because paying moved you onto a much more valuable list. A person who has paid once is the most sought-after name in this trade, and files of proven payers are sold on. Some victims in these cases made dozens of payments.
The US Postal Inspection Service and the Justice Department's Consumer Protection Branch treat it as mail fraud, with 20-year maximum sentences per count. Convictions here include the operators and, separately, the printing and mailing business that produced the notices.
Register with the mail preference service in your country, ask the post office about refusing specific senders, and — importantly — help them stop replying, because every reply improves their position on the lists. Reporting to the Postal Inspection Service in the US is what builds these cases.
It does not need to work often. Millions of notices in one case produced victims in the thousands: a response rate well under one per cent is entirely viable when printing and posting is cheap and each responder pays repeatedly.
Report it
Reporting is what produces the enforcement data on this page. Find the right agency and phone number for your country on the report page. If money moved in the last few hours, call your bank first.