A Canadian-French dual citizen was convicted Friday for his role in perpetrating a 20-year mass mailing fraud that brought in $175 million. The mailers sent out were from purported psychics.

From 1994 to 2014, Patrice Runner sent millions of letters to American consumers, each message claimed to be an individualized note sent by a psychic medium. The correspondence promised recipients the opportunity to strike it rich with the psychic’s aid — in exchange for a fee.

Once a victim had paid the fee, they received even more supposedly personalized letters from the psychic, offering more services and items in exchange for more fees. 

While the letters claimed that the psychic depicted had a personal vision regarding the victim, the millions of messages were form letters, each one nearly identical to any other letter sent out by conspirators like Runner.

The psychics portrayed in the letters had no role in the scheme, neither sending correspondence nor receiving responses from victims.

Over the course of the 20-year operation, Runner instructed other conspirators who did day-to-day work on the scheme through a Canadian company. To obscure his own involvement, Runner used shell companies registered in Canada and Hong Kong, all the while living in foreign countries: Switzerland, France, the Netherlands, Costa Rica, and Spain.

The decades-long fraud was eventually busted, and four other defendants, Maria Thanos and Philip Lett of Montreal, Sherry Gore of Indiana and Daniel Arnold of Connecticut, previously pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit mail fraud prior to Runner’s conviction.

Runner would be extradited from Spain back to the U.S. in December 2020, and was convicted on 14 counts total, each carrying a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison.

Runner was found guilty of conspiracy to commit wire and mail fraud, conspiracy to commit money laundering, eight counts of mail fraud and four counts of wire fraud. Runner was found not guilty on an additional four counts of mail fraud.

“For over 20 years, Patrice Runner managed a predatory scheme that targeted older American by mailing personalized letters to millions of victims purporting to be from a world renowned psychic. [The] verdict should have come as no surprise to Runner,” U.S. Postal Inspection Service Philadelphia Division Inspector in Charge Chris Nielsen said in a statement.