A man was sentenced to 16 years in prison and must pay $3.2 million in restitution to Amazon after he pleaded guilty to textbook fraud. (Staten Island Advance/Annalise Knudson) Staten Island Advance/Annalise
GRAND RAPIDS, MI – A man was ordered to pay $3.2 million to Amazon after he was sentenced to prison for his role in textbook rental fraud.
Geoffrey Mark Hays Talsma, 37, of Portage, was sentenced July 27, to 14 years in prison for mail fraud and two years for aggravated identify theft in U.S. District Court, Western District of Michigan.
Talsma pleaded guilty to the charges Feb. 25. A total of 28 other charges, including mail fraud, wire fraud and false statement to the FBI were dismissed when he was sentenced.
Related: Two Kalamazoo County men sentenced in Amazon textbook rental fraud
He must pay $3,227,347.82 of restitution to Amazon.
Amazon has zero tolerance for fraud and thanked law enforcement for acting on their referral in the case, an email statement from an Amazon spokesperson said.
Talsma would create multiple Amazon accounts to rent textbooks and then sell the books for a profit instead of returning them, U.S. Attorney Andrew Birge said previously. The scheme took place between January 2016 and March 2021.
Three other people pleaded guilty and were sentenced in the case. Lovedeep Singh Dhanoa, 25, of Portage, was sentenced May 24 to 15 months in prison. Gregory Gleesing, 43, of Portage, was sentenced June 1 to three years of probation. Paul Larson, 32, of Kalamazoo, was sentenced to six months in prison June 21.
From September 2016 to October 2019, Larson, Gleesing and Dhanoa said they would assist Talsma in renting textbooks from Amazon, the men said in their guilty pleas.
Related: Portage man, 32, fourth suspect to plead guilty in $1.5M Amazon textbook fraud case
Talsma taught them to create multiple Amazon accounts with fake names, multiple street address and emails to avoid Amazon’s limit of 15 textbook rentals per customer, the men said in their pleas.
They would get the books at a fraction of their value and then sell them to bookstores and online to make a profit without paying the buyout price to Amazon, the pleas said.
Talsma would share the profits with the men after he sold the textbooks online and to a local bookstore in Kalamazoo, the release said.
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