THE MARIA DUVAL letters may have been written by all sorts of copywriters over the years, but we were at least sure that they’d started with Infogest, the Swiss company that Jean-Claude had founded all those years ago.
Near the end of our international calling spree, we spoke with a man named Lukas Mattle, who had once been listed on business filings as a director of Infogest. It appeared that Lukas had gone on to run a driving school, whose website featured a witch on a broomstick with wheels and the motto “Driving Is No Witchcraft.”
We gave him a call to see what he knew.
Lukas was driving through the mountains of Switzerland and his cell phone was going in and out of service so it took several dropped calls to get through to him. He spoke very little English, but we were able parse out something that piqued our interest. He said that he had worked at Infogest for a while but that the company—and Maria—were “finished.”
We quickly started peppering him with more questions. What did he mean by “finished”? Did this mean Infogest was out of business? And if so, how were the Maria Duval letters still being sent out? Unfortunately, he was either playing dumb or had no idea what we were saying, because all he would say was “I don’t know”—even when we asked him if he could understand us.
We tried to confirm this new information on our own. We called Infogest’s Swiss telephone number, and the line was disconnected. A more comprehensive search of business records showed that the company was indeed liquidated in 2014, the same year of the US government’s lawsuit. So who was calling the shots now if Infogest was “finished,” and Jacques and Jean-Claude really were out of the picture?
As we returned home from work each night, we found it nearly impossible to quiet our racing minds. Out to dinner with family, watching TV, walking to the subway, at the gym, we would recheck our email on our phones, desperately hoping for the clue we had been waiting for. The holidays were approaching, but it was hard for us to think of anything else but our investigation. No longer outside observers, we were living fully inside this alternate universe full of conmen and shell companies. Before and after work, and all throughout the weekends, we emailed and texted back and forth constantly with each new theory that popped into our heads. Our loved ones were also wrapped up in the mystery, since it was all we could talk about. They were eager for us to find answers as each new crazy story or clue emerged.
We decided to turn to the most recent traces of Maria and the letters, searching for any proof of letters that had gone out since the US lawsuit was filed in 2014. This led us to Russia, where we found a flurry of Maria Duval activity: complaints, news articles, and, most notably, a Russian website offering psychic guidance. Using a much different template from her US websites, this site, with a muted purple background, featured a doctored version of one of the photos on Flickr from her Russian press conference (in which she was wearing the same chunky necklace and black, cleavage-baring top), next to an astrological chart. Across the top of the page was a toll-free number people could call to supposedly reach the clairvoyant, and there was an online form asking for personal information and how Maria could help, whether it be with money, wealth, or health.
There was also a page full of testimonials, which featured photos of real people next to each glowing review. Curious who these people were, we used a tool that allowed us to search images on Google that indicated where each specific image had appeared online. These cheesy photos were nothing more than stock images.
All of these traces of Maria Duval in Russia led us back to Jacques.
As we discovered earlier, a number of copyrights had recently been filed for Maria Duval ads in Russia and Ukraine. Listed as the registrant for these copyrights was the same company that Jacques had represented two years earlier at the shady marketing conference in Marbella, Spain, before his untimely death. It was also the same company listed as the most recent contact for Maria’s US website.
To gather more information, we decided to call a man named Lucio Parrella, who appeared to work at the company. We were surprised when he acknowledged that he currently sold rights to Maria Duval’s books, yet he also claimed to have nothing to do with Jacques and to know nothing about her letters. When we asked why his company’s email address was listed as the contact for Maria’s website, he said he had no idea and was working on getting it removed. Then he let it slip that Jacques might have been the one to put it there.
We were finally starting to form what seemed to be a very plausible theory: If Jean-Claude really had retired in 2006 as he’d said, maybe Jacques was the one who’d kept the scheme going for practically another decade. And with Jacques so recently deceased, it was quite possible that there wasn’t anyone in charge anymore.
Much of the evidence we’d seen of letters going out, from online complaints and trademark filings to news reports, was from before Jacques’s death. This left us wondering what Jacques’s death meant for the future of the letters. And for Maria.
One thing was clear: many of the people we tracked down seemed to be nothing more than cogs in this massive machine. It was likely that their involvement in the scheme earned them money, even if it was simply being paid to put their names on official filings. These were the people used to keep investigators at bay, the fall guys if the ship went down.
It was no wonder that this was such an impossible case for law enforcement agencies to solve. There were so many companies. And so many people. And the money and the letters seemed to have gone through an endless number of hands. The Maria Duval “fraud in a box” had been passed around the world for decades, leaving valuable letter templates in the hands of an unknown number of people and operations. Now, with no clear leader, copycats appeared to be out there who used crude copies of images and letters found online to perpetrate their own versions of the scam.
We were confident that the Maria Duval scheme had started decades ago with two enterprising businessmen who were no longer the nucleus of the operation. Yet as we packed away our large notepad with the sprawling business web scrawled across it, we knew the story wasn’t over. Maria was very much a real woman out there somewhere. But we still knew little about why she’d let herself get caught up in such a heartless fraud. Was it money? Love? Ego?
It was with her that our journey began, and it was with her that it must end. We needed to uncover the real story of the psychic herself.