United States v. Kentz

With a partner, Charles Kentz (defendant) created a fraudulent telemarketing business that targeted elderly victims. In this scheme, Kentz called elderly people and told them that they had won large prizes—but that they needed to send money to Kentz to pay for taxes and fees before they could receive their prizes. However, no prizes existed, and Kentz kept the money for himself. After this first joint business defrauded victims out of $500,000, Kentz started a second, similar fraudulent business on his own. A few months later, Kentz was arrested for fraud relating to both telemarketing schemes. Kentz posted bail and was released pending trial. While released, Kentz continued committing telemarketing fraud through the second business. Kentz also started a third business and committed additional telemarketing fraud through that business. At trial, Kentz was convicted of defrauding more than 300 elderly victims, which included the additional fraud he had committed while on pretrial release. During Kentz’s sentencing, the district court applied several enhancements to Kentz’s baseline sentence, including (1) a 10-level enhancement for the amount of loss Kentz caused, (2) a three-level enhancement for committing new crimes while on pretrial release, (3) a two-level enhancement for defrauding vulnerable victims, and (4) another two-level enhancement for defrauding a large number of vulnerable victims. Kentz appealed, arguing that the pretrial-release enhancement was invalid because he was not given specific notice about this potential enhancement when he was released. Kentz also argued that the district court’s application of the large-number-of-vulnerable-victims enhancement was inappropriate for several reasons, for example, because (1) 300 victims was not a large number of victims for a telemarketing scheme and (2) the enhancement overlapped with the other enhancements, e.g., the ones for large financial losses and vulnerable victims, which meant that some of the same conduct was penalized more than once.