Diet pill fraud nets 20-year below-guideline federal sentence (and ads for diet pills)

This federal sentencing story out of Florida, which is headlined "Diet pill creator sentenced to 20 years for Lipoban’s fraudulent claims: Boca Raton man bilked more than 130,000 customers, feds say," caught my eye for various reasons. Here are the interesting details:

Lipoban was advertised as a miracle drug that absorbed fat, allowing people to shed weight without changing their diets. The claim was a lie, but the pills did absorb something — money from people's wallets. The Boca Raton man behind the ads spent the better part of three decades making similar weight-loss claims, raking in enough money to buy a posh Virgin Islands hideaway.

Frank Sarcona's years of amazing diet promises came to an end Friday as he was sentenced to 20 years in federal prison for bilking more than 130,000 Lipoban customers out of at least $10 million.

A federal jury in West Palm Beach convicted Sarcona in October of 29 felony counts related to Lipoban, including money laundering, wire fraud and misbranding of a food. Sarcona, 58, secretly helped form Lipoban in 2000 just months after cutting a deal with the Federal Trade Commission over the misleading claims of his previous weight-loss company, SlimAmerica.

Even before Sarcona started Lipoban, a federal judge described him in a 1999 ruling as having "a long record of assorted fraudulent schemes which have bilked thousands of victims out of millions of dollars in more than a dozen states." With such weight-loss companies as Forever Thin and Amerdream, Sarcona racked up 13 state or federal cease-and-desist orders dating back to 1984.

After federal authorities raided Lipoban in 2004, Sarcona started up yet another diet pill company, Nature's Pharmacy, using an advertising campaign nearly identical to Lipoban's.

Before learning his fate Friday afternoon, Sarcona made one last pitch — a 15-minute plea for leniency to U.S. District Judge Kenneth Marra.  He portrayed himself as a crusader for dietary supplements in the face of a federal government that, he said, wants to suppress them.

He acknowledged that he make mistakes in his Lipoban advertisements, but said he could have fixed them if the government had alerted him to the problems. "I don't stay up at night thinking of ways of bilking little old ladies out of $50," Sarcona said.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Kerry Baron told Marra that Sarcona had spent a lifetime deceiving people, preying on those desperate to lose weight. "If Mr. Sarcona is not given the stiff sentence he deserves, he will repeat this," Baron said.

Sarcona had faced between 27 and 33 years behind bars under federal sentencing guidelines. Marra opted for a shorter sentence, saying that while the guidelines might be appropriate for someone running a Ponzi scheme, they weren't in a case where victims lost only what they paid for the pills, typically $60 per bottle.  But Marra said Sarcona still needed a lengthy prison sentence to reflect on his history of suspect business practices.

It struck me as notable that the federal sentencing judge justified a below-guideline sentence for the defendant because his fraud was not of the Ponzi variety.  I also found interesting that the defendant (effectively?) pitched for sentencing leniency by saying he was a "crusader for dietary supplements."  And finally, as clicking through the to on-line newspaper article shows, it seems that this crusade has worked: there were links to at least three diet pills ads on the webpage with this article.