The operator of a Canadian company has been accused of using a Hyde Park mail drop as part of a phony hair testing service.
Kyle Tsui, 41, of Ontario, was extradited from Spain, arrested on Nov. 21, and charged in U.S. District Court in White Plains in a $5.9 million mail and wire fraud scheme. He pled not guilty.
Hair samples that had been sent to The Shipping Place in Hyde Park were thrown away at Tsui’s direction, according to the indictment.
“As a result,” the indictment states, “the purported results provided to customers were not based on testing the hair samples as promised, but were simply made up.”
Tsui’s Allergy Testing Company claimed that its hair tests could determine a body’s intolerance or sensitivity to more than 400 types of food and drink and 400 environmental items such as pollen and detergents.
Customers paid from $26 to $79 for various tests and received reports on substances to avoid and on foods and supplements that could improve their health.
Customers were instructed to mail hair samples and test forms to Laboratory Group, 3979 Albany Post Road, #2088, Hyde Park, New York.
Personnel at The Shipping Place were directed to open the mail, discard the hair, and email the test applications to Tsui.
For about eight months, from September 2018 to April 2019, the mail drop collected about 4,500 pieces of mail for Tsui weekly and Tsui’s company sold about $5.9 million in food sensitivity tests.
Tsui’s business received about 80% of the sales, according to a court record, and The Shipping Place was paid from 25-cents to 50-cents for each envelope it processed.
Tsui had allegedly told The Shipping Place that he did not need the hair because duplicates had been sent to another location. But customers interviewed by investigators said they had not submitted duplicates.
In 2019, personnel at The Shipping Place told Tsui that they had been interviewed by a U.S. postal inspector, according to a criminal complaint. Tsui instructed the personnel to stop discarding the hair and to mail the samples to his address in Canada.
In March 2019, after investigators interviewed Tsui, he allegedly transferred nearly $3.7 million from a bank account in the U.S. to a Canadian bank account.
U.S. Magistrate Judge Judith C. McCarthy ordered Tsui to be kept in custody.
His attorneys, Jeffrey H. Lichtman and Jeffrey B. Einhorn, did not reply to a message asking for comment on behalf of their client.
According to news stories, Tsui also has been associated with Viaguard Accu-Metrics in Toronto and various testing services.
In 2013, for instance, Viaguard offered DNA tests to determine the sex of birds, based on plucked feathers and toenail clippings.
Also in 2013, Accu-Metrics claimed to have verified with 99.99% probability that two Canadian brothers had been fathered by a deceased former Canadian prime minister who had been believed to be childless.
In 2017, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation cast doubt on an Accu-Metrics test that purportedly proved that a North Carolina woman was a descendant of an extinct Indigenous people from Newfoundland.
In 2018, a member of the Confederation of Aboriginal People of Canada submitted two samples to Viaguard Accu-Metrics for Native American DNA tests.
But the samples were actually from a chihuahua and a French poodle and were labeled under human names, according to the CBC. The test results claimed that both dogs had 20% Native American ancestry.
