The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City's Jen Shah arrested on fraud charges
The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City star Jen Shah was arrested Tuesday in Utah on federal fraud charges, with prosecutors accusing her of running a telemarketing scheme for nearly a decade that targeted "hundreds" of victims, many of them 55 and older, across the United States.
Shah, 47, and her assistant, 43-year-old Stuart Smith, are facing charges of conspiracy to commit wire fraud in connection with telemarketing and conspiracy to commit money laundering. The indictment against them claims that their scam began in 2012 and ended this month, with the defendants selling services like website design and tax preparation to "hundreds of victims ... many of whom were over age 55" and didn't own computers. They then allegedly made lists of their victims and sold them to other participants in the fraud, receiving a "share of the fraudulent revenue" that was earned.
A person with knowledge of the matter told Variety Shah was filming when she was arrested, and was about to leave for a trip to Colorado with her Real Housewives of Salt Lake City co-stars. How's that for a storyline!
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Catherine Garcia is night editor for TheWeek.com. Her writing and reporting has appeared in Entertainment Weekly and EW.com, The New York Times, The Book of Jezebel, and other publications. A Southern California native, Catherine is a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
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