In this true crime episode of Mailin’ It!, we are joined by U.S. Postal Inspector Greg Ghiozzi to hear how USPIS uncovered a fake mail-order allergy testing company. Inspector Ghiozzi explains how the fraud scammed over 88,000 people out of nearly $6 million before USPIS put a stop to it. Discover how a mail carrier’s tip sparked a multi-year investigation that uncovered money laundering and ultimately led to an international arrest.
Uncover the true story behind a $6 million mail-order scam with hosts Karla Kirby and Jeff Marino, joined by Inspector Greg Ghiozzi of the U.S. Postal Inspection Service. Together, they reveal how a fake allergy testing company duped tens of thousands of people into mailing in locks of hair—while running a multimillion-dollar scheme behind the scenes. Follow along as they break down the investigation and share how USPIS brought this hair-raising scammer to justice through extradition and conviction.
Karla (00:07):
Hi, everybody. Welcome to “Mailin’ It!”, the official podcast of the United States Postal Service. I'm Karla Kirby.
Jeff (00:14):
And I'm Jeff Marino. In this episode, we're digging into our latest true crime story from the files of the US Postal Inspection Service. At the heart of this case is something many of us can relate to—allergies. I think most people would agree that when it comes to allergies, it makes a lot of sense to know what you're dealing with because some allergies aren't much more than a nuisance, but others can be life threatening.
Karla (00:39):
Most people will go to an allergist for that kind of test. Most, but not everyone. And that's where our story begins in 2019, with a mail order allergy testing service. That wasn't exactly what it seemed, actually, it wasn't anything like it seemed. And here to tell us about that is Postal Inspector Greg Gazi, a 21 year veteran of the US Postal Inspection Service, who's based in Westchester County, New York. Greg, welcome to “Mailin’ It!”
Greg (01:09):
Thank you. I'm happy to be here.
Karla (01:11):
For those listeners who are new to the podcast, the US Postal Inspection Service is the law enforcement arm of the Postal Service. They're responsible for protecting the mail, postal employees, and customers from crime and fraud. Greg, before we get into the details of this case, can you sketch out the basics for us?
Greg (01:32):
Yes, thank you. So back in 2019, we received a tip from a mail carrier that opened up a large investigation into a mail order allergy testing company that our investigation later showed scammed more than 88,000 people out of $6 million. The scam was run by a Canadian citizen, who over the years, appears to have been involved with numerous scams involving genetic testing and other types of scientific testing. The scam we're talking about involved individuals who were interested in identifying food sensitivities and potential allergies and then found this company who allegedly would allow them to send in their hair samples to receive a diagnosis on what their food sensitivities and allergies were. So people were instructed to cut off their hair and make a payment from anywhere from $28 to $229 and then mail the hair sample to the Allergy Testing Company, which was located here in New York. And then they would receive a report that provided them a breakdown of what food sensitivities or allergies they may have.
Jeff (03:02):
So maybe it's me, but I question the wisdom of getting medical services from an online company, but maybe I'm just a little old fashioned. So, Greg, let's go back to the start. You said your case started with a tip from a mail carrier, right?
Greg (03:16):
Yeah. So an astute mail carrier who delivered the mail in Hyde Park, New York, noticed that thousands of letters were being sent to a commercial mail receiving agency in Hyde Park. Now, commercial mail receiving agency is a private business that accepts mail from the postal service on behalf of people or businesses that rent mailboxes. So you could do that with the Postal Service, but you could also do it with a private business. So, the mail carrier noticed individuals in the commercial mail receiving agency opening up these thousands of thousands of letters and appeared to just throw out the contents into the trash. So he did a little more digging and reported to us that something seemed very suspect about this commercial mail receiving agency receiving this mail and just throwing out the contents.
Karla (04:19):
Well, Greg, that definitely sounds suspicious. Why would someone go to the trouble of renting a box just to throw out the mail that they were receiving?
Greg (04:28):
So it turns out that according to employees at the commercial mail receiving agency and the owner, that they were instructed to dump the contents of each envelope, which would've been hair samples, while still maintaining some of the customer's information, like their address, their email, and collecting any money that might be in the envelopes. But the hair sample that had been sent, they were instructed just to dispose of.
Jeff (05:07):
And the mail carrier actually saw this happening, saw someone opening the envelopes and dumping the contents into the garbage?
Greg (05:14):
Yeah, it, it appears since there were so many envelopes coming in that they were doing it at all times. They were throwing away the samples and recording the information at, at all times during the day. And I think the commercial mail receiving agents actually had to hire individuals just to do this because they’re receiving so much mail. And, you know, we train our carriers to if they see something that is suspicious to let us know. And, you know, that's something that also includes different fraud schemes that, that we come across frequently in our position. So this, you know, the report of the, the mail carrier eventually made its way to our office in Westchester, New York. We were able to confirm from the CMRA owner and employees at the CMRA that the hair in the envelope was being thrown out and that the information that was written on the forms were, was being sent to a person running a company called the Allergy Testing Company. And that was located in Canada and the representative for the commercial receiving agency I mean, it was very clear what he said. He said, you know, I'm instructed to do this. We get paid to do this. And this is what we've been doing. And we were also instructed and we kind of knew this from the mail carrier already, but that the box would receive thousands of envelopes per day.
Karla (06:56):
Well, you would think the CMRA employees would've known something was a little fishy there, but it seems like crimes that cross borders and involve other jurisdictions are pretty common for the US Postal Inspection Service cases. We've discussed a few of them in previous episodes on the podcast. What do you do when a case leads you to, in this instance, Canada or any other foreign country?
Greg (07:20):
So, Canada, we have a very good relationship with. And we have some contacts that we have in Canada at some local municipalities and then also on the federal level that we're able to reach out to on a law enforcement to law enforcement basis. And they're able to provide us some information and, you know, we'll do the same for their cases. So, in this instance, we were able to reach out to investigators in Ontario, Canada, who were able to provide us some information about The Allergy Testing Company. We also were just interested in hearing the side of the story of The Allergy Testing Company. So we were able to deduce the name of the individual who's running the company. His name was Kyle Tsui, and we're able to obtain a phone number for him.
Greg (08:22):
So, I gave him a call, and he answered, and what he described to me was that the hair samples are collected and tested in the laboratory. And he didn't say anything about them being thrown out or there being a second sample, you know? So, at the end of that conversation with him, where he described it to me as these hair samples were being tested in the laboratory, I knew that this was a fraud because we knew that he was actually instructing the CMRA employees to throw away the hair samples. So it'd be impossible for the hair samples to ever be tested. Unfortunately, we don't have the power just to go, you know, over to Canada and arrest someone because we're federal law enforcement officers here in the United States. But what we could do, is we could start building a case here and then when the time was right, try to get Kyle Tsui to the United States or to try to work with Canada to arrest him or other countries that he might cross into.
Jeff (09:40):
So that makes sense. You have to build a case. So you started with statements from the mail carrier, you talked to the commercial mail receiving agency representatives. What else do you need to prepare a case against any suspect?
Greg (09:54):
Obtaining information. Right. So that involves in a case like this that would involve speaking with victims. That would involve subpoenaing financial institutions that are handling the funds that are eventually going to Canada. That would involve search warrants on emails or cloud services. It would involve requesting assistance from international authorities and speaking with other law enforcement.
Jeff (10:30):
So the search warrants, the collaboration with the other agencies and stuff. What did you learn about the case from there?
Greg (10:40):
This wasn't a case that would be difficult to prove that there was something criminal going on because it was so apparent that this hair wasn't actually being tested. So that part wasn't the difficult part. What we had to do was get a better grasp of the size of the fraud and the number of victims and the amount of money. So that is typically done through subpoenas. So a subpoena allows us to get information from a private institution like a bank. So in order to see how much money he received, we subpoenaed his bank information in the US and we found that he obtained over $6 million through this fraud. So in addition to the financial institutions, we subpoenaed an e-commerce site that he was selling his services through. And the information received from the e-commerce site showed us the number of victims, and the number of victims here in the U.S. was approximately 88,000 people. So that means 88,000 people ordered one of these tests that the test wasn't actually happening, and that's just in the United States. We also saw evidence that he was running the same scam in other countries, Europe, Australia, but we focused on the 88,000 victims here in the United States and Canada.
Jeff (12:32):
So, I understand as part of your investigation as well, the Postal Inspection Service actually tried to submit a sample. Tell me about that.
Greg (12:44):
Sure. So even though the evidence was very strong we worked with the local police in Hyde Park to submit a hair sample from a Barbie doll. Knowing that if anything came back we'd be able to easily prove that there was no actual testing going on. So along with the Hyde Park Police, we sent a hair sample from the Barbie doll, and I believe it came back allergic to a number of things. And, you know, great evidence of course for our future case.
Karla (13:26):
So with all of the evidence that you were able to gather as part of your investigation, how were you able to get to a point of an arrest warrant?
Greg (13:37):
As soon as we had a full picture of what was going on I spoke to him. He wasn't able to provide me any evidence that this wasn't a fraud during that conversation. And that was a casual conversation just between me and him. I'm not even sure it was recorded, but I'm not even sure he, you know, he knew what was going on at that moment. I think he, after he thought about it a while, he did because he transferred $3.7 million out of his account likely to hide the money shortly after that conversation. So we knew it was a fraud from the CMRA, what he told us, we had an idea of the size of the fraud, and we had a list of all the victims at that point. We work with the US Attorney's Office here in the Southern District of New York, and were able to get an arrest warrant issued for Kyle Tsui. Once you have an arrest warrant,
Greg (14:44):
if he was just in the United States, we could go travel to wherever he was and arrest him, he'd go before the judge and then then decide whether or not he wants to go to trial. But since he was in Canada, it makes it a little more difficult. We are able to extradite from Canada, but it just takes an extremely long time especially if someone's a Canadian citizen. So what we might do in a situation where we have an arrest warrant for someone in Canada, is just wait to see if he's going to travel the US or if he's going to travel to another country that we could more easily extradite from. And that's what we did. We waited and at some point he traveled to Mexico which typically we have an easier way of extraditing from, and they notified us that he was there.
Greg (15:41):
Just to take a step back, we had issued a red notice through Interpol that goes out to all Interpol affiliated countries. And those countries will monitor their populations, and if the individual that's on the arrest warrant happens to pop up in their country, they should notify us or the United States. So when Kyle Tsui traveled to Mexico, they knew there was a red notice out for him, and we reached out and they reached out to us and we said, yeah, can you please help us with extradition? But I guess at that moment they weren't able to help us. And that, you know, that can be a political thing. It could be a million things, but they weren't able to help us at that point. So we're a little upset and we were, but still determined to get Kyle Tsui.
Greg (16:43):
So, we waited, and we waited, and then finally we waited until Kyle Tsui and his family took a vacation to Madrid. And that was in the summer of 2023. When that happened, the Spanish authorities in Madrid let us know, hey, this individual's in our country, what do you want us to do? And we said, could you please detain him? We have an arrest warrant out for him. And they did. That was, I think, four years after we actually filed the complaint. So we had to be very, very patient. He was in the Spanish prison system for a few months until he was extradited to the United States.
Karla (17:34):
Well, that was definitely more of a vacation than he bargained for. So did Tsui fight the charges or try and come up with some excuses for what he did?
Greg (17:44):
He did not. I mean, I think he realized the evidence was so strong against him that there wasn't really anything he could do to fight it. All the money was going to him. The recorded conversation he had with us, the conversations he had with the CMRA owners, the owner, everything pointed to this being an unwinnable case for him. So he pled guilty to wire and mail fraud just a few months later after he was brought to the United States in early 2024. And then he was sentenced to 41 months in federal prison in September 2024, he was ordered to forfeit more than $4 million, and he still sits in prison to this day.
Jeff (18:41):
So did you find out if there was actually any scientific basis that analyzing hair is a way to test for allergies?
Greg (18:48):
So from everything I've read and what's put out by the FDA and other, you know, government trusted organizations, is there's no scientific evidence that analyzing hair is a reliable way to test for allergies. It can be used for maybe drug use or, you know, detection of heavy metals, but nothing related to, I found no good evidence related to it being used for allergy or food sensitivities.
Jeff (19:24):
So how does this case compare to the types of cases that you normally work on for the Postal Inspection Service?
Greg (19:31):
So, we're lucky enough to have a breadth of different various cases. This type of case, which is really a consumer customer fraud where so many people were victimized isn't so normal, but it's when you do get a case like this, you really want to work it hard because there's so many people that it affects. Sometimes we have cases where there's, you know, like an investment fraud case where there's fewer victims, but they've lost more money. This case was more of a situation where the individuals may have not lost a lot of money, but they may have gotten sick because they ate something, they thought they had allergies, they didn't think they had allergies but it turns out that they did have allergies, they might have gotten sick, or people stopped eating certain foods because they received a bogus report saying that they might have been allergic to something that they were not. So, in that sense, it was rewarding to arrest Kyle Tsui and get the word out that, you know, the reports are bogus because you're hoping to help these 88,000 individuals who ordered testing and receive, you know, bogus reports.
Karla (21:06):
So with the training that our letter carriers receive, and just based on information we've covered in previous cases with the inspection service, I can only imagine you get hundreds, maybe even thousands of tips. So when you get these cases, these tips, these calls, how do you determine whether a case is worth pursuing?
Greg (21:30):
I mean, just over time you kind of understand, you know, what might turn into a big case. And typically, you do an initial investigation where you make some calls, you do some maybe public information searches, and you kind of analyze the information you have from an initial investigation. And if it's pointing to it becoming a larger investigation, then you'll pursue it. But sometimes it's difficult because there's only a certain amount of us and there's a lot of fraud in the world. So we try to concentrate on the more impactful investigations.
Jeff (22:17):
So I'm wondering if a lot of Tsui's victims even knew they were being scammed. So can you tell us whether the victims of the testing scam are being compensated or who they can contact if they did pay for a test from Tsui’s company?
Greg (22:32):
Sure. So a judge didn't order compensation to the victims because there's so many victims out there. And just setting up a system to compensate everyone would've been too difficult. And the amount lost by each individual was on the lower side of the types of these types of cases. It was, you know, at most hundreds of dollars, which isn't too little, but it would've been very difficult to give everyone their money back, especially because all the money isn't there. A lot of the money was spent. But victims can reach out if they want additional information to an email address, which I could spell out, which is U-S-A-N-Y-S dot allergy testing@usdoj.gov.
Karla (23:34):
So for the, for the individuals who choose to reach out and maybe, I guess, submit a victim impact statement or request additional information, what are they being told about the tests or the test results that they received?
Greg (23:50):
So they're being told that they should not believe anything on that test, and if they're really concerned about allergies, they should go see a doctor not, not someone who's just profiting or scamming you. So that I, I believe that is what they're being told.
Karla (24:09):
So I have another question. So you mentioned that the judge indicated no compensation for the victims. So where exactly did the $4.1 million go?
Greg (24:22):
Sure. So a lot of it was just used to run his business just to enrich himself to provide him you know, a luxurious l lifestyle. And then some of the money was seized by the Department of Justice.
Jeff (24:41):
Interesting. So Greg, that's a heck of a story. I think there's a good lesson out there for people to take away is don't trust everything you see on the internet. For sure. Any other thoughts before we before we depart?
Greg (24:56):
An interesting side note is that Kyle Tsui was also being investigated by the Canadian Broadcasting System for another business he was running, which was related to prenatal paternity testing. It appears like according to their investigation, that he was also running bogus paternity testing, which you could only imagine how that might affect someone's life if they're told or not told that a child is theirs when the testing wasn't actually being done. So just another aspect of what he was doing, and he's never been criminally charged with anything related to that matter, but there is a Canadian Broadcasting corporation expose on, on and, and podcast on, on that part of Kyle Tsui’s business life.
Karla (26:02):
So for, for our listeners, if they think that they may be getting scammed or they're become aware of a scam, where can they report this to the inspection service?
Greg (26:15):
Sure. So if you think you're being scammed and it touches the mail in any way you can go on our website, which is USPIS.gov or www.uspis.gov, and there's a section there for mail fraud complaints, and you can click on it and provide your story and any backup documents you might have. And if it rises to the level of something that we could investigate and prosecute, we will certainly do so.
Karla (26:50):
Well, Greg, thank you for joining us. Another interesting case and another lesson learned.
Greg (26:57):
My pleasure. Again, very happy to be here.
Jeff (27:02):
Yeah, Greg, thanks for your time. This is a heck of a story.
Karla (27:21):
So it is time for another round of, “Did You Know?” when we share interesting facts about the Postal Service. Jeff, if you don't mind, I'm gonna take this one.
Jeff (27:31):
It's all yours.
Karla (27:32):
This one's got some history to it, but it's also highly relevant today. Did you know Certified Mail celebrated its 70th birthday this year?
Jeff (27:43):
Is that right?
Karla (27:45):
Absolutely. The Post Office Department introduced Certified Mail in 1955, and it's been a hugely important offering for lawyers, businesses, government agencies, and regular customers alike. Certified Mail is a domestic mail service introduced a decade after the end of World War II as a way to give senders proof that something was mailed and that it was delivered, or at least a delivery was attempted. Certified Mail was created to provide a more affordable alternative to Registered Mail for sending mail that's very important, but doesn't have a lot of monetary value. This type of service became incredibly important in the post-war era, thanks to an increase in legal, financial, and government paperwork sent via the Postal network.
Jeff (28:36):
Well, I'm wondering if new digital ways of verifying messages have taken over. Do we still track how much customers are actually using Certified Mail these days?
Karla (28:45):
Actually, Certified Mail is still going strong. We don't break out specific numbers, but USPS considers Certified Mail an “extra service” – the same as Return Receipt and Registered Mail. According to our fiscal 2024 report to Congress, that group of offerings generated about 5 billion in revenue.
Jeff (29:07):
Well, that is significant. So how has Certified Mail changed to keep up with the times?
Karla (29:13):
Well, we've modernized it over the years. You can now use the assigned Certified Mail tracking number to check on the status of delivery, get mail notifications, and even request electronic return receipts. There you have it, 70 years of Certified Mail and hopefully many more to come. So Jeff, another great case from the Inspection Service, but I gotta wonder who is sending locks of hair in the mail?
Jeff (29:49):
I guess somebody who's looking for a deal, you know, they, there were coupons that they were seeing and they thought, hey, this is an easy way to do it. Might as well get tested this way.
Karla (29:59):
Clear case of getting what you paid for.
Jeff (30:02):
But you know, the thing that sticks with me is when Greg said it took him a lot of patience to finally make the arrest. Years of time passed between issuing the warrant and when they were actually get him, and all I kept thinking was this guy got caught because he was lazy. He had somebody else throwing out the evidence. If he had taken the time to do it himself, he probably never would've got caught.
Karla (30:26):
I guess one of the things that stuck out for me was at the commercial retailer, they actually opened the mail and threw out the contents and didn't think anything of it.
Jeff (30:36):
Yep, exactly what I'm talking about.
Karla (30:38):
Definitely keep in mind, do your research if it seems too good to be true,
Jeff (30:46):
It probably is. And that's all for this episode of Mailin’ It! Don't forget to subscribe to Mailin’ It! wherever you get your podcast to make sure you don't miss the next episode and follow along on Instagram @USPostalService, X @USPS, Facebook and YouTube.com/@usps.