Why so slow?

The post office podcast features a big catch by the postal inspectors. Last year they finally convicted Patrice Runner and his associates for one of the biggest frauds in history. He operated for 20 years, 1994 to 2014, and took in $175 million from 1 million victims.

The swindle was low price and high volume. His factory sent out thousands of letters each day, always fakely personalized with your name and address, claiming to be from “famous psychic Maria Duval”. Maria** had a premonition about you and would tell you how to improve your luck for a mere $40. After the first $40, the filtered suckers were worked deeper into the net, gathering more info and “personalizing” the results more.

Something is odd about the prosecution. Why did it take so long for such a massive operation? He was working purely with paper mail, never switched to the web. Yet the PO didn’t try to prosecute him until 2004. After getting lots of complaints they tracked down his company and stopped the flow of mail, leading to an agreement to shut down. Runner simply switched names and addresses and kept going for another 10 years before the PO prosecuted more seriously.

In the end he received 10 years in prison for a 20-year career in crime. The case got very little attention. I’m always interested in fraud cases, but I didn’t see anything about it. Google finds only a few news articles.

Why so slow, and why so little attention? I guess the simplest answer is best. Swindling the poor doesn’t matter much to government and media. Swindling the rich is instantly stopped.

Madoff and Sam Bankman swindled the rich. Sam didn’t even swindle honest people. His rich slimeball customers knew what they were doing when they sent millions to an outfit in THE BAHAMAS. His customers were other rich swindlers like himself, accustomed to evading taxes and stealing from the poor. They had the resources and knowledge to check on their “investments”.

In terms of Natural Law balancing, Bankman was doing some good along with breaking the law. He was depriving other rich fuckheads of resources. Patrice Runner was purely evil, depriving poor people of money they needed to survive.

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** From other podcasts, Duval isn’t entirely fictitious. She’s a real person with a reputation in “psychic” circles. She franchised her name and picture to the fraudsters.