Penny Pucket was one of the two dozen people Jen Shah from The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City victimized, scammed out of thousands of dollars, and said the experience left her feeling ashamed, depressed, and pretty angry.
Pucket originally spent $97 on a program to help market her baby blanket company. This initial purchase led to her information being sold to other companies who convinced her to purchase more programs. Eventually, Pucket spent $29,000 and finally realized she’d been scammed.
Jen Shah victim left feeling embarrassed after being scammed
Pucket admitted to being depressed and embarrassed. “I had a lot of dark days,” she said on the Behind the Velvet Rope with David Yontef podcast. “There was a lot of days that I’d cry all day thinking how am I gonna get all this money back? And I didn’t tell anybody until the interview that I did with ABC a year and a half ago. Up until then, I hadn’t talked to anybody about what had happened to me. Except for my family.”
Her sadness turned to anger when she wondered how Shah would repay the money she scammed. “And I was more upset after I heard that she had finally got what she deserved. They said in the media clip that ABC had sent me, that she was gonna pay everybody back.”
“Well if that’s one of her things that she has to do, why aren’t they making her liquidate her assets to pay all these people back?” she questioned. “Six and a half years is what she got. So she said she’d pay everybody back after she got out. Well, she could get rid of some of that stuff. She doesn’t need a big luxury house. She can live in a regular house like the rest of us.”
Jen Shah’s victims lost their homes – ‘Where’s the justice?’
Shah was sentenced to six and a half years for conspiracy to commit wire fraud. “A friend of mine had given me the article that told about where she’d got sentenced and that she was gonna pay everybody back and all of that,” Pucket said. “At first, I thought, well, she got what she deserved. Actually, she probably needed more time for what she’d done.”
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“Then I got angry because here she had this huge house, had lived off of everybody’s money, had all of this stuff and she gets to keep it all,” she said. “And there were people that actually even lost their homes from her scams and were homeless. So where’s the justice actually, where is the justice in all of it? Just because she got sent to jail for six and a half years, that doesn’t make things right on the other end.”
Penny Pucket’s son was angry she didn’t ask for his help
“Well, they’re smooth. I mean, they know how to manipulate you,” she said about Shah. “And I thought how stupid, you are a stupid idiot. I was embarrassed. I didn’t tell anybody. My husband and I were the only ones that I said anything to. We were the only two people that communicated and knew what was going on.”
“And then finally I had to tell one of my kids and he said, ‘Mom, why didn’t you come to me? I could have helped you.’ I’m going, yeah, but you’ve got a family of your own now. You had other obligations. They had babies and,[were] trying to make a living of their own. So, I thought, I’m a big girl, I can handle this. But they were really angry at me because I didn’t ask for their help.”
