Repeated pattern

The latest Post Office podcast tells how the postal investigators solved an allergy testing fraud. Fits nicely into my current situation, trying to fix a bad allergic response!

The case began when an alert postman in Hyde Park noticed fishy activities in a commercial mailbox service there. He saw their employees opening lots of letters and simply throwing away most of the contents, then writing a brief note for each. He notified the investigators.

The real recipient of these thousands of emptied letters was in Canada, just like two other huge frauds in the podcasts. He had ordered the mailbox service to toss the contents and forward the checks along with the name and address of the sender. After looking in the dumpster, investigators found the contents were hair samples.

The fraudster Kyle Tsui was charging people to send him hair samples, which he then “tested” and found several specific allergens, all fictional. To prove the fraud directly, investigators pretended to be a customer and sent a sample of plastic hair from a Barbie doll, which came back with a lengthy list of allergens. Thus proving that the results were fake even if the samples had actually reached Canada. This prevented the defense from arguing about the mailbox service.

Kyle Tsui literally fleeced about 80,000 people and made 6 million dollars. Unlike the usual scam, each victim only lost about $100, not everything, but each victim was also turned away from correct diagnosis. After turning myself away from proper diagnosis of an allergy, I recognize the serious nature of distraction. I didn’t have to pay a fraudster for a bad diagnosis; I built my own DIY fraud.

In 2019 the PO got an arrest warrant and asked Canada to extradite, but Canada was reluctant, which is apparently typical. (I’m starting to wonder if Canada is an intentional fraud haven like the Bahamas.) An Interpol alert kept the US authorities informed when he traveled. In 2023 they caught him on a vacation in Spain, like another of the previous cases. Spanish authorities are much more willing to work with us. He was finally sentenced to 4 years in late 2024.