NEW YORK, Jan. 6, 2023 (Gephardt Daily) — “Real Housewives of Salt Lake City” star Jen Shah has been sentenced to 6 1/2 years in prison for her role in a telemarketing scheme.
Judge Sidney Stein ruled Friday that Shah would spend 78 months behind bars, according to a press release from the United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York.
The Bravo celebrity pleaded guilty in July to conspiracy to commit wire fraud for running a telemarketing scheme that defrauded elderly people out of thousands of dollars. She also agreed to forfeit $6.5 million and to pay $9.5 million in restitution as part of her plea agreement.
Shah was ordered to report to a still-to-be-determined federal facility on Feb. 17, according to release.
In July, Shah changed her plea to guilty in the first of two charges in a wire fraud case in Manhattan federal court after previously pleading not guilty. The second charge was dropped as part of the plea deal.
“In 2012 to March 2021 in the Southern District of New York and elsewhere, I agreed to commit wire fraud,” Shah told Judge Sidney Stein, reading from a prepared statement, according to ABC News. “I knew this was wrong. I knew many people were harmed and I’m so sorry.”
The charge stems from the Department of Justice indicting Shah in March 2021, along with her assistant Stuart Smith, in a nationwide telemarketing fraud scheme that allegedly defrauded hundreds of victims, from 2012 to March 2021, many of them senior citizens.
Shah and Smith sold services to senior citizens claiming to make businesses more profitable, but they were actually “just fraudulent schemes, motivated by greed, to steal victims’ money,” Manhattan U.S. Audrey Strauss said in a DOJ statement.
The pair pleaded not guilty in April of last year to charges of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering. Smith changed his plea to guilty to the charges against him in November.
