Information for Victims in Large Cases

Blake Rubin, 30, of Huntington Valley, PA, Chase Rubin 28, of Rydal, PA, and Justin Diaczuk, 31, of Philadelphia, PA, were recently charged with running a multi-million dollar telemarketing scam. According to the information, the defendants duped more than 70,000 people into buying what they falsely marketed as a general-purpose credit card that customers could use to buy merchandise over the internet and improve their credit.

From February 2005 through October 2007, the defendant operated Smoke Shop and Accessories which conducted money transfer transactions. Counterfeit checks were mailed to individuals who were advised to cash and wire a portion of the proceeds to a third party. The wired monies were then intercepted and used for the defendant’s personal use.

The indictment alleges that from in or around August 2006 through in or around August 2008, Bowdoin operated a "Ponzi" scheme through a company

Criminal information was filed in Manhattan federal court chargin Bernard L. Madoff with eleven felony charges including securities fraud, investment adviser fraud, mail fraud, wire fraud, three counts of money laundering.

Quality Egg, LLC (also known as Wright County Egg and Environ), Austin (Jack) DeCoster, and Peter DeCoster pled guilty to a misdemeanor charge of introducing adulterated eggs into interstate commerce. The charge resulted from Quality Egg, LLC’s sale of eggs contaminated with Salmonella Enteriditis between about the beginning of 2010 and August 2010.

Quality Egg, LLC also pled guilty to one count of bribing a USDA Inspector and one count of selling mislabeled food with intent to defraud or mislead.

Studio Traffic was an organization that represented itself to be an investment mechanism whereby members could open an account by depositing money with Studio Traffic and thereafter earn a return on their investment. Rather, Studio Traffic redistributed funds from other members to provide the appearance that profit was being credited to member accounts.

A federal grand jury has indicted Brian Keith Wallen, age 52, of Lutherville, Maryland, and Andrew Stafford, age 56, of Bel Air, Maryland with conspiracy to commit mail fraud and mail fraud arising from a nationwide fraudulent telemarketing scheme designed to ship unwanted and vastly over-priced light bulbs and cleaning supplies to thousands of businesses and non-profit organizations.  The indictment was filed on June 30, 2016 and unsealed upon the arrest of Andrew Stafford.  Brian Keith Wallen was reported missing on April 28, 2016, and is still being sought by law enforcement. Specifically, the indictment alleges that from about 2007 to 2014, Wallen, Stafford and other conspirators telephoned authorized representatives of businesses, who were often maintenance employees, on behalf of Midway companies. During these phone calls, the conspirators sought to conceal Midway’s true locations in Reisterstown, Maryland and in Florida.  According to the indictment, during the initial calls, Wallen, Stafford, and the conspirators promised national store gift cards to the authorized representatives to induce them to place initial orders, or to provide Midway with additional company information or personal information, like the authorized representatives’ home address and personal phone number.  The conspirators used the cell phone numbers and/or birthdays of the authorized representatives as “purchase order” numbers in order to lend legitimacy to later collections efforts.In addition, during the calls the conspirators allegedly made false statements, including: that the victim businesses had an existing business relationship with Midway; and that Midway would send a “half box” of light bulbs.  In fact, the “half box” was a deceptive technique used to understate the volume and price of shipments, and disguise unwanted future shipments.  Wallen, Stafford, and the conspirators allegedly did not divulge the price of any products, engaging in a practice called the “price blow-off,” falsely telling the victim business that they did not have the price in front of them, but that it would be at the corporate discount.  In fact, Midway did not offer a corporate discount.The indictment alleges that as a result of the fraud scheme, Midway sent fraudulent invoices to victim companies for more than $100 million and received more than $50 million in payments on those invoices.

Kemp & Associates, Inc. and Daniel J. Mannix were charged with engaging in a conspiracy to allocate customers of heir location services sold in the United States beginning as early as September 1999 and continuing as late as January 29, 2014 , which resulted in sales of heir location services at collusive and noncompetitive contingency fee rates.

Eight individuals, including Kristopher Lee Dallmann and Darryl Julius Polo, have been charged with conspiring to violate federal criminal copyright law by running an entity called Jetflicks, an online, subscription-based service headquartered in Las Vegas, Nevada, that permitted users to stream and, at times, download copyrighted television programs without the permission of the relevant copyright owners. According to the indictment, the defendants reproduced tens of thousands of copyrighted television episodes without authorization and made these infringing programs available to tens of thousands of paid subscribers located throughout the U.S. At one point, Jetflicks claimed to have more than 183,200 different television episodes. One of the defendants, Polo, left Jetflicks and created a competing site based in Las Vegas called iStreamItAll (ISIA) that at one point claimed to have 118,479 different television episodes and 10,980 individual movies. Like Jetflicks, ISIA offered content for a regular subscription fee to viewers around the United States, and ISIA publicly asserted that it had more content than Netflix, Hulu, Vudu and Amazon Prime. In addition, the two services were not only available to subscribers over the internet but specifically designed to work on many different types of devices, platforms and software including numerous varieties of computer operating systems, smartphones, tablets, smart televisions, video game consoles, digital media players, set-top boxes and web browsers. 

Both Jetflicks and ISIA allegedly obtained infringing works from pirate websites around the world—including some of the globe’s biggest torrent and Usenet sites specializing in unauthorized content such as The Pirate Bay, RARBG, and TorrentDay—using automated computer scripts to locate, download, process, and store the illegal files, and then quickly make that content available on servers in Canada to United States subscribers for streaming and/or downloading. Essentially, Jetflicks and ISIA were two of the largest streaming services in the United States but did not compensate copyright owners for streaming and making available for download the unauthorized works they offered to their paid subscribers.

Besides the conspiracy charge, Dallmann has been charged with additional counts of criminal copyright infringement as well as money laundering in connection with Jetflicks, and Polo faces similar additional charges in connection with ISIA. More information can be found in the DOJ press release.