NEW YORK (Scripps News Salt Lake City) — If the federal government has its way, a Utah reality television star will spend the next decade behind bars for taking part in a nationwide telemarketing scheme.
In a sentencing submission filed Friday, the U.S. Attorney’s Office asked Judge Sidney Stein to sentence Jen Shah to 120 months in prison.
Jennifer Shah, center, of “The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City” reality television series, touches her face mask as she leaves Manhattan federal court, after pleading guilty to wire fraud conspiracy, in New York, Monday July 11, 2022. She admitted that she and others defrauded thousands of individuals nationwide for almost a decade with a telemarketing fraud that convinced victims they could make a lot of money through their own online businesses. (AP Photo/Lawrence Neumeister)
Shah, who has appeared on Bravo’s popular “Real Housewives of Salt Lake City” series since 2020, pleaded guilty in July to federal wire fraud charges that said she and her assistant enticed victims into entering business opportunities in Utah, Nevada and Arizona and then sold their names to telemarketers in New York and New Jersey.
According to the charges, the scam mainly targeted senior citizens between 2012 and 2016.
“At the defendant’s direction, victims were defrauded over and over again until they had nothing left. She and her co-conspirators persisted in their conduct until the victims’ bank accounts were empty, their credit cards were at their limits, and there was nothing more to take,” the government wrote in the submission.
Shah, 49, is scheduled to be sentenced on Jan. 6.
This story was originally published Dec. 23 by KSTU in Salt Lake City, an E.W. Scripps Company.
