Prosecutors pursuing charges in telemarketing case

Federal prosecutors are pursuing criminal charges against operators of a defunct Bucks County company that helped fraudulent telemarketers steal millions from mostly elderly victims.

The grand jury investigation was disclosed in a court document filed last week in a 2006 federal civil suit against Payment Processing Center L.L.C., of Newtown.

Patty Hartman, spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney's Office in Philadelphia, said her office was prohibited from talking about grand jury matters.

The U.S. attorney in February 2007 won a permanent injunction closing PPC because of its role in the scamming by telemarketers of 350,000 mostly elderly victims of $60 million over 11 months.

The disclosure of the grand jury investigation came after Wachovia Corp. in April agreed to pay up to $144 million for allowing PPC and similar companies to withdraw money from victims' accounts between 2003 and 2006. Federal regulators had found that Wachovia, the region's largest bank by deposits, engaged in a "pattern of misconduct" in the bank's role in processing allegedly fraudulent checks.

A federal judge around the time of the injunction appointed a receiver to oversee the winding down of PPC, which now has $5.1 million in the bank.

That official, Wayne D. Geisser, of Nihill & Riedley in Philadelphia, received a grand jury subpoena on June 5 seeking compact discs containing documents produced for PPC defendants by Richard M. Meltzer, a lawyer. He allegedly provided legal counsel to PPC while his law license was suspended, according to the federal civil suit.

In an unrelated 2004 case, Meltzer, a former federal prosecutor, was sentenced to one day in prison, 15 months' house arrest, and a $50,000 fine for defrauding a corporate client by seeking $25,000 from an opponent in a lawsuit.

Meltzer's attorney, David E. Shapiro, had no comment.

Under a November 2006 consent order from a federal judge, Geisser was to hold those documents until told otherwise. Geisser asked the court last week to relieve him of that order, so he could provide the documents to the grand jury.

Geisser had no comment yesterday. His attorney, Patricia M. Hamill, of Conrad O'Brien Gellman & Rohn P.C., did not return a call seeking comment.

Donald M. Hellinger, a key executive involved in PPC and related companies, said he did not have a lawyer and had no comment. "I'm really not familiar with the documents," he said.