Jennifer Shah, who gained fame as a cast member on the reality television show “The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City,” was sentenced on Friday to six and a half years in prison for her involvement in a telemarketing scheme that defrauded thousands of victims, prosecutors said.
Ms. Shah used the scheme to finance her luxury lifestyle, which included a rented 9,420-square-foot mansion in Park City, Utah, that she referred to as the “Shah ski chalet,” a rented apartment in Midtown Manhattan and a leased Porsche Panamera, prosecutors said.
The criminal case against Ms. Shah had been heavily featured on the Bravo reality series, which turned the charges against her into a dramatic plot point.
In her tagline for the second season of the show, she declared, “The only thing I’m guilty of is being Shah-mazing.”
In court papers, prosecutors cited that line to argue that Ms. Shah had mocked the charges against her.
Ms. Shah’s lawyers wrote in court papers that the show was a “semi-scripted, heavily edited facsimile of ‘reality’ intentionally manipulated to maximize ratings” and that it did not accurately reflect her feelings about the case.
Her lawyers blamed the show for making it seem, as her sentencing date approached, as if Ms. Shah was “intransigent, defiant, and often even unrepentant, about her actions here.”
“Nothing could be further from the truth,” Ms. Shah’s lawyers wrote. “Just as Jen Shah has never been a ‘housewife,’ little else is real about her persona and caricature as portrayed by the editors” of “The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City.”
A spokeswoman for NBCUniversal, Bravo’s parent company, declined to comment.
The show, which premiered in 2020, purports to depict women living glamorously while negotiating issues like sex and religion in a city that is home to the headquarters of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
At her sentencing in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York on Friday, Ms. Shah said she was sorry for her role in the scheme, which prosecutors said had defrauded victims by selling them bogus “business services” that promised to help them make money online.
She was ordered to pay about $6.6 million in restitution and to forfeit $6.5 million and 30 luxury items, including designer handbags and jewelry, prosecutors said.
In addition to the 78-month prison sentence, Ms. Shah, 49, of Salt Lake City, was sentenced to five years of supervised release.
“I want to apologize to all the victims and families and I take full responsibility for the harm I caused and will pay full restitution to all of the victims,” Ms. Shah said, according to NBC News. She added, “I recognize that some of you lost hundreds, and others lost thousands, and I promise to repay.”
Prosecutors said that from at least 2012 until March 2021, when she was arrested, Ms. Shah had been a leader of the wide-ranging scheme and had facilitated the sale of leads, or contact information for potential victims.
Victims were told during “coaching” sessions that the sessions would help them earn money from online businesses, prosecutors wrote in court documents.
Instead, the coaching sessions were designed to convince victims that, to make their internet businesses succeed, they would need to buy additional products and services, which were of little or no value, prosecutors wrote.
Many of the victims were over 55 and some reported losing tens of thousands of dollars, depriving them of much of their life savings, prosecutors said.
Ms. Shah was not deterred by Federal Trade Commission investigations and enforcement actions or by the arrest of dozens of others involved in the scheme, prosecutors said.
Instead, they said, she tried to cover up her criminal conduct by telling others to lie and delete text messages, placing businesses and bank accounts under other people’s names and taking steps to move some of her operations to Kosovo.
Before she pleaded guilty in July to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, Ms. Shah sold “Justice for Jen Shah” T-shirts that featured “NOT GUILTY” on the front and “#justiceforjenshah” on the back, prosecutors said.
“With today’s sentence, Jennifer Shah finally faces the consequences of the many years she spent targeting vulnerable, elderly victims,” Damian Williams, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, said in a statement.
“These individuals were lured in by false promises of financial security, but in reality, Shah and her co-conspirators defrauded them out of their savings and left them with nothing to show for it,” Mr. Williams said.
Prosecutors had asked the judge to sentence Ms. Shah to 10 years in prison. Ms. Shah’s lawyers had asked for a sentence of three years, writing in court papers that she was “an exceptional mother and a good woman who has already been punished extensively as a result of the sins of her past.”
“Though Ms. Shah admittedly played an important role in the particular fraud in which she was involved, she was only one of many people involved, was not involved in all facets of the conspiracy, never communicated with any of the victims, and she clearly did not invent this particular fraud,” her lawyers wrote. “Nor was she a mastermind.”
Claire Fahy contributed reporting.
Michael Levenson
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