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In 2015, a woman wrote to the Florida Attorney General about her 84-year-old mother, Ruby Helms, whom she said spent all her Social Security and Veteran’s benefits on scams. She lost out on over $50,000, her retirement investments, and jewelry. She went into extreme debt. She wrote, “I obtained copies of the checks and identified a pattern that fees from a significant number of these differently named sweepstakes were deposited in PACNET accounts.”

A woman from California, Jennifer Bell, noticed that a handful of checks sent to three different places were saved from an older relative’s digital bank records and were all stamped with “PacNet.” The 87-year-old woman who signed the check was struggling with dementia and sent thousands of dollars to many different fraudsters. Bell and other family members learned that the woman drained the $100,000 balance on a reverse mortgage which forced the family to give up the property. Bell said, “It's horrifying to think she was able to give that away in less than five years...of all of the things she didn't want...she didn't want to be in a nursing home. Because she gave all of her money away, her worst nightmare happened.” She died just last year.

PacNet doesn’t send out these solicitations, so victims of the scams don’t know where else to turn to get their money back or how to make these mail-fraud letters stop. According to the Treasury Department, PacNet “has a lengthy history of money laundering by knowingly processing payments on behalf of a wide range of mail fraud schemes.”

They add that although PacNet recognizes the “fraudulent activity of its clients,” they still process checks for them. This fraud is nothing new: a mail fraud victim receives a letter saying they won a few million dollars, but to claim it, he/she needs to pay a small sum. They pay it, and that money is processed via PacNet, who deposits the money using one of its many bank accounts all over the world, and they then send the funds to (minus the commission and fees) to the fraudulent company. So, while PacNet is benefiting off of fraudulent activity, they are processing the payment and not committing the fraud itself.

Over 20 years ago, Rosanne Dronsfield was a low-level bank employee in Canada. The banks she worked for shut down multiple accounts of direct-marketing clients because the way they were making their money seemed suspicious. This inspired Dronsfield to use her experience and connections to create a new business, PacNet Services, Ltd. This company would act as a payment processor that would cater to the clients that the banks wouldn’t deal with. Her organization, rather than providing bank accounts to these customers, uses its own bank accounts all over the world to process payments and distribute to clients in the countries they are based in. It started as a small operation in 1994 in Vancouver, and quickly expanded to over a dozen countries around the world.