A Deal with the Devil Read online

  “You could see the pressure of the pen. Obviously she was angry with herself,” Chrissie said. “To have a glimpse into somebody’s mind like that—how difficult it was for her to figure out a phone number that she has phoned for so many years. It’s scary.”

  We leafed through the pages of this small book as we talked to Chrissie. And though we had never met Doreen, it was painful for us to read these outbursts from a woman so trapped in her own mind.

  But this all came later. The first time Chrissie began to realize how bad things had gotten was in the winter of 2010, when she helped her mother go through all the paperwork that had been building up in the condo where Doreen lived alone.

  It was all so out of character. Doreen was once frugal and practical to a fault, owning her own successful business and managing her family’s finances at a time when few women did so. Now she seemed to have become an entirely different person. Doreen’s children found buried within the piles of coupons, magazines, junk mail, and the occasional misplaced sock a bill from a department store credit card with a shockingly high balance. Concerned, Chrissie dug into the rest of her mother’s finances. And when she turned to her mother’s bank statements, she saw a disturbing number of payments to two names she didn’t recognize: Destiny Research Center (while this name would remain a mystery to Chrissie, it would become very important to us) and Maria Duval. Every check was made for the same precise amount of $59 (in Canadian dollars).

  “Who is this? What is this place? What are you getting for this money?” Chrissie asked her mother.

  Suddenly, her mother’s pleasant demeanor was gone. She turned defensive and secretive and simply shrugged in response to Chrissie’s questions and admonishments. “She was unable—not unwilling, but unable—to specify what she was getting in return for this amount of money,” Chrissie remembers. “She finally showed me large round metal talismans encased in little velveteen pouches with symbols and some with motivational words or astrological signs on them.”

  These talismans must have been in her mother’s home for months. Only after this realization did Chrissie begin to notice them everywhere she looked, tucked away among her mother’s valued possessions. In her jewelry chest and dresser drawers, under papers, and in her purse. She even remembers Doreen wearing one around her neck. One time, when Chrissie was trying to tidy up the dresser in Doreen’s bedroom, she noticed a velvet pouch with a flimsy medallion inside it.

  “I shook it out and said, ‘Oh, what’s this? Is it garbage?’ I remember her taking it from me and clasping it in her hands, saying, ‘No, no, that’s special’ and putting it back into that pouch and holding that pouch like there was no way she was going to let me take that.”

  It was soon evident to Chrissie that the cheap trinkets and the mysterious woman from the letters were an inescapable presence in her mother’s life.

  When Doreen was at her best, Chrissie convinced her that the letters were a terrible scam that was stealing her retirement savings. This realization took a huge toll on Doreen. “She was shocked, dismayed, and ashamed when she realized her stupidity and the financial damage she’d caused herself,” Chrissie said. “I gave Mum strict orders to throw away anything from Maria Duval or Destiny Research; she seemed to understand my frustration and anger [at this scam] and readily agreed.”

  Still, as her memory declined, Doreen turned into a Dr. Jekyll of sorts and quickly returned to her secretive relationship with Maria, almost like a child hiding a secret stash of candy from her parents. Even after Chrissie and her brothers took away Doreen’s checkbooks and assumed legal responsibility for her finances, she would cobble together piles of cash and coins to make up the amount Maria was requesting from her.

  In a call that Chrissie will always remember, a woman named Maryanne, who worked as the secretary for her mother’s financial adviser, told Chrissie she needed to drive to Doreen’s house immediately. Maryanne explained that Doreen had called her earlier, telling her through tears that she had “done something naughty.” When Maryanne had arrived, she’d found Doreen surrounded by envelopes addressed to scammers like Maria Duval and stuffed with cash and coins. Doreen was completely distraught. After hurrying over, Chrissie walked into a heartbreaking scene, with Maryanne counting and sorting the money as Doreen sat looking on. “Mum wrung her hands, sitting forlornly in her armchair, a stack of tissues in her lap.”

  This incident proved to Chrissie just how much Doreen was wrapped up in the scam. From two years’ worth of bank statements, she’s certain that Doreen sent at least $2,400 to the psychic. Her total losses were likely much larger.

  “These scammers seem to have targeted my mother as easy prey, probably from the very first check she sent to them,” Chrissie told us. “Not only was my poor mother quickly losing her mind due to Alzheimer’s disease, she was lonely, bored, [and] wanting to be wealthy and well. She didn’t have the quality of mind anymore to realize how much money she was losing or how often she was sending money!”

  Finally, knowing that the painful tug-of-war with her mother wasn’t going to get her anywhere, Chrissie turned her anger and frustration to Maria. She reported the crime to the police, but they told her there was little they could do to help recover any of the money Doreen had given away. So she sent letter after letter to the address on the solicitations, tersely demanding a refund (“of any amount—even just $59.00 to show good faith”) and for Doreen’s name to be stripped from the mailing list. Her efforts proved fruitless. So Chrissie’s brother finally resorted to forwarding Doreen’s mail to his own home, where he could sort through all the junk mail and scam letters, keeping only the bills and other important documents. At one point, he received thirty-six scam letters in a single day, all addressed to Doreen. As his trash soon overflowed with her mail, Doreen was crestfallen by her suddenly empty mailbox.

  Doreen’s relationship with Maria had clearly taken over much of her life. It was Maria, it seemed, who helped her get through some of her loneliest days. The psychic’s lengthy, personalized letters with all of their promises gave her something to look forward to—and hope that her life, and especially her health, could change for the better.

  So as Chrissie’s brother handled all the mail, Chrissie turned into an armchair detective, scouring the internet in an attempt to uncover which heartless criminals had gotten their hands on her mother’s hard-earned money.

  “It was painful. Then it was frustrating. Then I just grew angry,” Chrissie said. “I’m not an angry person by any means. It takes a lot to get me mad but, boy oh boy, to find out how long they had taken advantage of this woman who believed that she was getting something for her money.”

  Chrissie spent months trying to get to the bottom of the fraud. When her mother passed away a few years later, roughly a year before we began our own hunt for answers, Chrissie still had no idea who was behind the Maria Duval letters.

  • • •

  Maria’s letters weren’t the only ones that enthralled Doreen.

  As her mind deteriorated, she descended into an alternate universe in which her daily pile of mail became what she lived for. In these piles she found exciting, official-looking letters telling her that she was the lucky winner of thousands of dollars, mail-order catalogs with colorful photos of nifty gadgets that she could look forward to arriving on her doorstep, and pages and pages of thoughtful and uplifting letters from her pen pal Maria Duval.

  In her right mind, Doreen would have kept only what was important, like a letter from a friend, a financial statement from a bank, or a Christmas card from a family member. As her condition worsened, everything blended together. It was nearly impossible to sort the truth from the lies. She didn’t realize that the official-looking notices promising lottery winnings, for instance, were nothing more than phony award templates designed on someone’s computer and that she was not a lucky winner. She also didn’t realize that the money she was sending in to claim these prizes would be lost forever.

  In the winter of 2010
, when her children found that first department store credit card bill hidden in the clutter that covered much of her home, they also discovered that all these scams and mail-order purchases had dug their mother into tens of thousands of dollars of debt. Adding it up by hand, Chrissie determined that Doreen owed more than $50,000 to four different credit card companies and that for months her primary bank account had been overdrafted. As a result, they were forced to cash out a chunk of Doreen’s prized retirement savings to keep her from spiraling even deeper into this hole.

  Even as her family tried to rein her in, one of her sons caught her with two envelopes waiting to be mailed, filled with ninety dollars apiece, addressed to a place in Malaysia. Another time, Doreen was stopped just before sending even more money to mailboxes in New York and elsewhere overseas. In Doreen’s mind, these payments would allow her to receive large sums of money that were on hold just for her.

  Doreen’s story didn’t come as a surprise to us. Our investigation into this shadowy world of mail fraud would show us that elderly people around the world, a generation that has traditionally trusted what reached them through mail delivered by government postal workers, were the prime targets of scams like the Maria Duval letters. Many of them are desperate to believe the outlandish claims of huge winnings, better health, or companionship. They give away their life savings as they respond to letter after letter, scam after scam. One of the readers who sent us the piles of scam letters and solicitations told us the story of her relative, who drained the entire $100,000 reverse mortgage on her house, forcing her into her worst nightmare as she lived out her final years in a nursing home. Each of these heartbreaking stories adds up to a staggering amount of damage to a segment of society that can afford it the least, with elderly Americans losing around $3 billion to fraud and other financial abuses every year.

  In many cases, this financial ruin starts with what is known as a “sucker list.” Someone may give a generous donation to a charity, respond to a newspaper advertisement for a supposed research study, or buy a magazine from Publisher’s Clearing House in the hopes of winning big. But then his or her name becomes currency, often starting out with some legitimate business or nonprofit but soon ending up with professional data and list brokers who may be willing to sell such names to anyone who will buy them.

  These lists of names, bundled in categories like elderly lottery players, technologically challenged, and likely to believe in psychics, are big business in the world of scammers. They are what make it possible for even the most amateur con artist to reach an astounding number of victims, and specifically to target the people who will be most vulnerable to his or her schemes—people like Doreen.

  Chrissie has no idea how her mother landed on one of these lists, whether it was through subscriptions to Reader’s Digest, Publisher’s Clearing House, or some other random mail-order purchase. All she knows is that somehow her mother was directly in the crosshairs.

  Amid all the different scams that entered Doreen’s mailbox over the years, Maria Duval’s was something special. Doreen couldn’t even explain it to Chrissie when she asked her about it. There was something that kept Doreen sending check after check, even as she could barely fill out the boxes and sign her own name.

  • • •

  Maria’s victims are all over the world, but they have one thing in common: desperation. We found stories from her victims everywhere we looked—online, in old newspaper clippings, and in the many government documents detailing the scam.

  Many of the victims reminded us of Doreen: Suffering from illnesses that were chipping away at their brains. Lonely after spouses and friends had passed away. Living on a fixed income and worried about everyday bills or the money they were going to be able to leave behind. “He is so desperate for money that he pins all his hopes on this,” one person wrote online about their ninety-six-year-old father-in-law who refused to believe that the letters were a scam and even tried to send a cash payment after his family closed his bank account.

  In a letter to Maria that was found by US authorities, another victim wrote that she was in such serious financial straits that she was struggling to afford new glasses or a dentist appointment. She apologized to Maria for not writing more often, telling her that she was “in distress” with back problems. “I am getting more broke every day. I can’t send what I don’t have.”

  And an eighty-two-year-old widow from Oregon said she regretted the day she first sent money to Maria. Even after realizing it was a scam, she wrote in a 2009 complaint that money continued to be deducted from her checking account—presumably because the scammers had access to her account and were making automatic deductions. “I live on Social Security, so don’t have very much money. Can someone please help me?” she wrote.

  It was clear that people like this were the perfect targets. But we wanted to understand why. So we called Dr. Peter Lichtenberg, a clinical psychologist and the director of Wayne State University’s Institute of Gerontology, who has studied the financial exploitation of the elderly and the underlying psychology of scams for years.

  “It’s a combination of loneliness, depression, and a real sense of invisibility,” he told us when we asked him what made people fall for a scam like the Maria Duval letters. This isolation and psychological vulnerability creates the perfect setting for a scammer to enter people’s lives. As they are feeling invisible to society and even to their own families, suddenly someone out there—in this case, a woman who looks so trustworthy and kind from her photo alone—has chosen them and is giving them the attention they have been missing. For those who feel like they have lost their sense of self, this scam makes them feel important. The promises of financial windfalls also tap into the overwhelming desire at this stage in people’s lives to be able to create a legacy for future generations.

  To make matters worse, many people suffering from dementia are more likely to become secretive or suspicious of their own family members, especially if those individuals are attempting to pry into their finances or personal lives. This makes someone like Maria, whose letters profess love for who they are and an understanding of everything they’re going through, that much more attractive. And it makes it even harder for families to break through. The Maria Duval scam reminds Dr. Lichtenberg of a cult in the way that it creates a special relationship with its victims that is entirely resistant to logic.

  “The key is almost cult indoctrination. . . . They’re so far in, you have to cut the contact off in order for them to come back to reality,” he said. “It’s the leader, the belief in this person, in this woman and her magical gifts and her specialness.”

  Hearing this, we thought about how family members told us about letters warning victims to keep their relationship with Maria a secret, one that outsiders simply wouldn’t understand. Dr. Lichtenberg said that even mild symptoms of aging can affect someone’s ability to reason—a person doesn’t need to have severe cognitive impairment. Deteriorating memories can also play a role in an individual’s susceptibility to such a scam, as many victims are unable to estimate just how much money they’ve been sending.

  Some of Maria’s victims weren’t elderly or cognitively impaired at all. Rather, they were simply lonely, and looking for a last resort. And others just seemed more easily persuadable, trusting to a fault. “I have sent this woman lots of my money where I could not pay my bills,” a mother of five wrote in an online consumer complaint forum in 2014, saying that she was living on a fixed income and thought that sending money to Maria would help bring about a better life for her children. “Yes I feel like a fool, but when you receive [these] letters over and over you feel like a failure if you did not send it in to get a better life for your children.” In another online complaint, a woman from Michigan recounted how Maria’s letters had come to her in some of her darkest days—soon after she separated from her husband, lost her job, and said a hard goodbye to her son, who had joined the military. “This scam crushed the last bit of hope I had in any kindness or
miracle that could be, and pushed me over the edge,” she wrote. “Congrats! You got another weak one.”

  A Utah resident ended up in even worse financial shape after sending money to Maria. “All she wanted from me is money. Now I am homeless and $5000.00 in debt,” the person wrote in an online complaint. “I need dental care, and I have no money to pay.”

  It wasn’t surprising for Dr. Lichtenberg to hear that it wasn’t just the elderly who were being duped by this scam. The same desperation can attack anyone’s judgment, he told us, whether someone is dealing with a death in the family, job loss, financial misfortune, or depression. “The human condition is not all that different throughout life,” he said. “People get the feeling of invisibility and think, ‘This is not what life should be, this is not what I expected life to be.’ ”

  In some cases, Maria’s letters have taken a more sinister tone, suggesting that misfortune awaited those who ignored her.

  In 1997, one woman told the Scottish Sunday Mail newspaper that she was terrified of what would happen if she didn’t send money. “When I wrote to say I didn’t have that kind of cash, the letters got even more frightening,” she said at the time. “I was so scared I couldn’t eat or sleep, worrying whether I’d be hit by more bad luck.”