EAST ST. LOUIS, Ill. - A Florida man has been ordered to spend 13 years in federal prison and repay nearly $12 million he scammed from U.S. consumers who unwittingly signed up for bogus credit cards.
Peter Porcelli II, 55, of Oldsmar, Fla., pleaded guilty in May to all 19 conspiracy and fraud counts related to the telemarketing scheme through which authorities say he defrauded or tried to dupe at least 165,000 Americans, many with poor credit histories.
U.S. District Judge William Stiehl, in sentencing Porcelli on Monday, ordered that he spend five years on supervised release after his prison term.
Porcelli has been free on $1 million unsecured bond since shortly after his March indictment. He should learn after about 60 days when he'll be required to report to the Bureau of Prisons to begin serving his sentence, a worker in Stiehl's office said Tuesday.
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Prosecutors alleged that Porcelli offered consumers a MasterCard credit card for a one-time processing fee ranging from $160 to $500. The schemers allegedly collected the fee from the bank accounts of tens of thousands of consumers.
Those charged the fee were sent a "benefits package" consisting of offers that usually already were available for free to the public, along with other promotional literature and general information on repairing credit, according to the indictment.
The mailing did not include a credit card but an "acceptance form" for what amounted to a prepaid card that, like debit cards, only allow purchases up to a set limit or up to a cash deposit backing the card. A consumer could get that card for an additional $15 fee, though few actually submitted that money, the indictment alleges.
A message left Tuesday with Porcelli's attorney, Ronald Cacciatore of Tampa, Fla., was not immediately returned.
The U.S. government alleges Porcelli carried out the scam over a 14-month span beginning in June 2001 through several of his Florida-based companies, including Bay Area Business Council Inc. and American Leisure Card Corp. He allegedly used call centers in Utah, Kansas, Oregon, Idaho, Arizona, Virginia, Florida and in other countries.
The alleged scam ended when the Federal Trade Commission sued Porcelli and others in August 2002 as part of a law enforcement sweep dubbed "Operation No-Credit."
In that civil lawsuit, a Chicago-based federal judge in 2004 permanently barred Porcelli and other defendants from telemarketing and selling credit-related products. That order also required the defendants to pay more than $12 million in restitution.
Porcelli, who filed for bankruptcy in 2003, had insisted in a previous court affidavit that neither he nor his company did anything wrong, the St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times has reported. Porcelli maintained that his Bay Area Business Council sold vacations, that the debit cards simply were included in the package, and that consumers misunderstood the sales pitch, the newspaper reported.
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