CENTRAL ISLIP, N.Y. – A Long Island, New York federal jury convicted a South Florida man of running a “mass mailing fraud scheme,” prosecutors said.
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Phillip Priolo, 61, of Hallandale Beach, “tricked thousands of victims, many of whom were elderly, into providing the defendants with money by falsely promising prizes,” investigators said in a news release on Wednesday.
Priolo was charged in November 2021 along with Shawn Phillips, 52, of British Columbia, Canada, and Jeffrey Novis, 79, of Long Island, New York.
Authorities said from March 2015 to December 2016, Priolo and his co-conspirators “mailed millions of prize notices that falsely represented that the victims had been specifically chosen to receive a large cash prize and would receive the prize if they paid a fee.”
“Victims who paid the requested fee, however, did not receive the promised cash prize,” the U.S. Department of Justice news release states. “Although the notices appeared to be personalized correspondence, they were merely mass-produced, boilerplate documents that were bulk mailed to recipients whose names and addresses were on mailing lists.”
Priolo faces 20 years in federal prison for each of the five counts he was convicted on in Central Islip, New York federal court: One count of conspiracy to commit mail fraud and four counts of mail fraud.
He’s set to be sentenced later in 2025.