On trial’s opening day, Canadian man admits to role in $30M nationwide magazine subscription scheme

A Canadian man has pleaded guilty on the first day of trial in Minneapolis to his role in a $30 million nationwide telemarketing fraud scheme that targeted elderly and vulnerable victims.

Abdou Diallo, also known as Abdou-Rahmane Diallo, 36, of Montreal, entered his plea to two counts of wire fraud on Monday in U.S. District Court. Sentencing is scheduled for June 5.

As co-owner and operator of Canadian-based Readers Services, a Canadian-based company, Diallo and others targeted people from 2011 through 2020 who had been victimized earlier by fraudulent magazine companies and were currently being billed by one or more of them on an ongoing basis and promised their victims that they would be able to cancel their subscriptions.

Diallo pretended to be from the magazine cancellation department and offered to pay off the victims’ outstanding balance and cancel their existing magazine subscriptions in exchange for a large lump-sum payment.

In reality, the victims did not owe Diallo or his company any money, and he had no power or ability to cancel the victims’ existing magazine subscriptions or any outstanding balances.

As a result, Diallo and others allegedly defrauded more than 20,000 victims, many of them elderly and vulnerable, across the United States out of roughly $30 million.

Diallo was one of more than 60 defendants who have been charged for their roles in a $300 million fraud scheme that exploited more than 150,000 victims. Most of them have done as Diallo did this week and pleaded guilty.

Court documents described how the investigation led by the FBI and U.S. Postal Inspection Service came out of a 2016 Minnesota Attorney General’s Office lawsuit against Wayne R. Dahl Jr., a 55-year-old Fridley man whose Your Magazine Service, Inc., was later ordered by a judge to pay $20 million.

Dahl pleaded guilty to running a decadelong scam that defrauded at least 13,000 people out of $11 million. Court records show that his sentencing remains pending.

Star Tribune staff writer Stephen Montemayor contributed to this report.