‘Lonely Hearts’ Swindler Gets Jail Sentence of 30 Months

A man who bilked at least 400 lonely-hearts victims in a nationwide letter-writing scheme in which he posed as Asian women seeking romance was sentenced Thursday to 30 months in jail.

Several times during the hourlong sentencing, federal Judge William D. Keller chastised Christopher Eugene Barnes, 37, who collected more than $280,000 from men from Syracuse, N.Y., to San Diego who thought they were joining a singles club to meet Asian women.

Barnes wrote thousands of erotic letters posing as women with names such as Velma Tang, Myra Perez and April Go, soliciting hundreds of dollars for club memberships and promises of lucrative business investments.

In 1988, Keller had sentenced the New Jersey native to six months in jail for operating a similar scam and expressed his displeasure at repeating the act.

“He’s not a felon with a gun,” Keller said. “He uses a pen and a typewriter. He’s been at it for more than a decade. He fleeces these lonely-heart types and when he gets out of jail, well, there he goes again. It’s the same old thing, what he did before.

“He’s a thief and a cheat. He hasn’t learned anything. There’s a lot of people out there aching to be scammed. And he’s going to do it.”

Keller also fined Barnes $30,000 to be used to compensate at least 400 victims identified by prosecutors, who said they would investigate whether additional men had mailed Barnes as much as $1,200 each.

“The number of potential victims is countless,” said Assistant U.S. Atty. Duane Lyons.

The 30-month sentence was ordered to run concurrently with a 24-month sentence for probation violation after the judge found that Barnes had written letters while on court-supervised probation for a similar fraud.

His hands shackled before him, Barnes said little during the sentencing and stared at the floor during Keller’s repeated reprimands.

“Mr. Barnes,” the judge said at one point, “you are really something.”