A 49-year-old man was today charged with defrauding parents of kidnapped children, including falsely promising some of them of bringing back their children allegedly abducted from the US and taken to India.
Peter Senese, of Brooklyn duped parents of abducted children into believing he had military and legal resources and a data base for tracking and recovering abducted children, who have been taken abroad.
Senese was arrested yesterday and produced in the federal court today. He is accused of wire fraud and faces up to 30 years in prison.
US Attorney for the Southern District of New York Preet Bharara said Senese founded the 'I CARE Foundation', which advertised itself as a "self-funded non-profit organisation dedicated to preventing child abduction and trafficking".
Senese allegedly defrauded parents whose children were victims of international abduction by falsely representing that he could rescue their children and bring them back to the US in exchange for money for his purported rescue operations.
Bharara said Senese "fed a pack of lies" to desperate parents by telling them that he could, for a price, locate and recover their kidnapped children.
"In fact, he could do no such thing, but that didn't stop him from allegedly repeatedly reaching out to the parents for more money to fund his non-existent rescue mission," he said.
The complaint filed against him cited instances in 2013 of Senese promising parents to bring back their children allegedly abducted from New York and taken to India.
Senese met the parent, described as "victim 1" in the complaint and promised him that he could return the child from India to the US within weeks.
Over the course of next months, he took thousands of dollars from the parent, saying he needed the money for his "rescue operation expenses".
He appeared on a local radio programme with the victim parent and sent numerous text messages to the parents and emails stating, in part, that he was either in India or an unspecified "remote location" and that the child would be returned to the US in a matter of days.
One of the text messages he sent to the parent concerned was that his return from India "might take a few additional days because of a change in Indian law".
Senese similarly defrauded another parent whose child was abducted and taken to India, the complaint said.
He promised to the parent that he would speak with "judges in India" to arrange for the child to be returned to the US.
The children he had promised to recover have never been reunited with their parents so far.
Senese also duped his victims into believing that he was working with a team of former members of the US Army component Delta Force.
Prosecutors said he had not travelled outside the US for years and when he had claimed that he was in foreign locations, he was actually in Miami, New York or Los Angeles.
