The leader of a massive telemarketing scheme that preyed on elderly and vulnerable adults to the tune of $103 million was sentenced Tuesday by a federal judge in Minnesota to 10 years in prison. The sentencing of Russell “Rusty” Rahm, 54, of Olathe, Kan., the most prominent of the 60 co-conspirators first charged in 2020 in what federal prosecutors called the nation’s largest elder fraud conspiracy, also includes two years of supervised release and an order to pay restitution in the full amount to his victims.
The perpetrators lived across the United States and Canada — as did their 183,000 victims who lost about $335 million. All of the 61 defendants have pleaded guilty. The U.
S. Attorney’s Office in Minnesota led the prosecution because the investigation grew out of a 2016 Minnesota Attorney General’s Office lawsuit against a Fridley man whose magazine subscription company was later ordered by a judge to pay $20 million. Rahm pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit mail fraud in 2022.
According to his plea, the conspiracy lasted roughly two decades, dating from 2000 until February 2020. He managed two magazine subscription companies in Shawnee, Kan., another suburb of Kansas City.
Rahm admitted that those, and other companies linked to the conspiracy, used fraudulent sales scripts and pitches to dupe victims into paying for expensive, and at times duplicative, subscriptions through a “series of lies or misrepresentations.” Co-conspirators traded .
