Stockton Springs man convicted of wire fraud for 2nd time [Bangor Daily News, Maine]
Todd Denson, 50, was convicted of 13 counts of fraud -- the second time in four years that he has been implicated in such a scheme. Denson spent 14 months in federal prison in 2007 and 2008 after he pleaded guilty to seven counts of mail and wire fraud.
Denson will be sentenced at a later date on his latest conviction but could face up to 20 years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000.
Jurors deliberated for nearly 3 1/2 hours Wednesday after hearing almost two full days of testimony from witnesses called by Assistant U.S. Attorney James McCarthy, including a U.S. Secret Service agent who has investigated Denson for years.
Denson's attorney, Virginia Villa, did not call any witnesses and did not ask Denson to testify in his own defense.
The trial centered on whether Denson intentionally defrauded people when he asked them for money with a promise that he would pay it back. For several years, dating back to before Denson's first conviction, the man has been involved in an Internet scam that many consumers received e-mails about but few followed through on.
The premise is simple: The e-mail recipient is instructed to send a certain amount of money overseas, usually to an African country, in order to access a much larger pool of money, usually millions of dollars. Similar scams were operated through mailed letters and fax machines for decades before they moved to the Internet in the 1990s.
Denson evidently became convinced the scam was real. In 2006, he claimed he sent $60,000 of his own money overseas with the promise that more than $9 million had his name on it. When Denson learned that he needed to send more money, he began asking individuals to "invest," but was untruthful about what the investment was.
The U.S. Secret Service first began investigating Denson in 2006. The man later confessed he misappropriated nearly $80,000 from several residents of Cumberland County, where Denson used to live and own a window-washing business.
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