‘Real Housewife’ Jen Shah sentenced to 6.5 years for telemarketing scam targeting elderly women

“Real Housewives of Salt Lake City” star Jennifer Shah was sentenced to six and half years in prison on Friday for running a nearly decade-long nationwide telemarketing scam that mainly targeted elderly women.

The reality TV personality broke down as U.S. District Judge Sidney Stein handed down the prison term in Manhattan Federal court.

“I do believe the sentence I’ve handed down appropriately reflects the crime,” Stein said.

Shah, 49, of Park City, Utah, was arrested in March 2021, for the nine-year telemarketing scam she joined in 2012. She pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud in July, a week before her trial was scheduled to begin.

The feds said Shah’s swindle targeted people 55 and older with bogus investment opportunities, like tax prep services and website design for small business owners, who often didn’t own computers. Many victims, who were primarily elderly, were repeatedly defrauded until they were broke.

“These are older, vulnerable women whose lives were turned upside down by the defendant’s telemarketing people,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Robert Sobelman said in court, adding that victims were “reduced to tears” in meetings with prosecutors.

“It was painful to sit through for them,” the prosecutor added. “And it was difficult for us.”

The victims, the judge said, “Can’t really be made whole emotionally. Their lives have been turned upside down.”

Shah rose through the ranks to become the scam’s ringleader, Sobelman said. She hired and coached new staff on a sales floor in Manhattan that she eventually bought. The prosecutor said Shah’s scheming was so prolific that her cooperating underlings regularly asked the feds, “How have you not charged Jen Shah yet?”

The TV personality played an “integral” role in the grift by generating and selling “lead lists” — which detailed contact information for potential victims susceptible to lies — to sales floors in New York, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, and New Jersey.

Sobelman said the feds’ probe into the nationwide con started five years ago and has resulted in charges against more than 30 people. He said an investigation and enforcement actions by the Federal Trade Commission didn’t deter Shah, but rather inspired her to take extravagant actions to hide her ongoing crimes and ask others to lie.

Prosecutors said evidence presented at trial — including around 300 text messages from her phone, often mocking victims as old as 80 — would have devastated Shah.

U.S. Attorney Damian Williams said the outcome represented justice served.

“With today’s sentence, Jennifer Shah finally faces the consequences of the many years she spent targeting vulnerable, elderly victims,” said Williams. “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.”

Addressing the court, where fans and her husband, University of Utah assistant football coach Sharrieff Shah, packed the benches, Shah said she was “deeply sorry” for what she’d done. She acknowledged hurting “innocent people.”

“Most people identify me with my public persona, the character Jen Shah that has been invented, designed and creatively edited for ‘The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City,’” she said. “But reality TV has nothing to do with reality.”

Shah also swore she didn’t come up with her tagline on the show: “The only thing I’m guilty of is being Shah-mazing.”

Judge Stein also imposed a five-year term of post-release supervision and ordered Shah to pay $6.6 million in restitution, $6.5 million in forfeiture fees, forfeit 30 luxury items, and 78 counterfeit luxury items. She must surrender to the federal Bureau of Prisons by Feb. 17.

Shah isn’t the first “real housewife” on Bravo’s hit reality franchise to find herself in handcuffs.

“Real Housewife” veterans of the New York franchise to find themselves in hot water in recent years include Kelly Killoren Bensimon, who faced charges in 2009 for allegedly punching her boyfriend. Luann de Lesseps was arrested in 2017 after she was accused of walking into the wrong hotel room and threatening a police officer. And Jules Wainstein was arrested in 2020 after a violent custody exchange with her estranged husband at a grocery store.

New Jersey housewife Teresa Giudice got 15 months in prison in 2014 for trying to finance her luxury lifestyle with $5 million in bogus mortgage and construction loans. Her then-husband, Joe, got 41 months behind bars and was deported to Italy.

On the West Coast, Beverly Hills housewife Kim Richards was accused of stealing from a Target store in 2016.

With Jessica Schladebeck