CAMDEN, N.J. – An Atlantic City, New Jersey, man was sentenced today to 66 months in prison for escaping from federal custody and engaging in a scheme to defraud women over telephone dating services, U.S. Attorney Philip R. Sellinger announced.
Patrick Giblin, 58, previously pleaded guilty before U.S. District Judge Robert B. Kugler to an information charging him with one count of escape from the custody of the Attorney General and one count of wire fraud. Judge Kugler imposed the sentence today in Camden federal court.
According to documents filed in this case and statements made in court:
On July 23, 2020, Giblin escaped from the custody of the Attorney General while traveling from a federal prison in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, to a residential living facility in Newark, where he had been directed to serve the remainder of a federal prison sentence. At the time, Giblin was serving a sentence imposed in 2017 for traveling interstate and using an interstate facility to promote unlawful activity in connection with a scheme to defraud multiple women. Giblin’s 2017 sentence followed an earlier sentence of 115 months in prison for a 2007 wire fraud conviction for a similar fraud scheme. Members of the U.S. Marshals Service located and arrested Giblin in Atlantic City on March 10, 2021.
From April 2019 through March 2021 – including during the time period when he was a fugitive – Giblin posted advertisements and messages on telephone dating services. Giblin cultivated a rapport with the women he spoke to on these services, falsely claimed that he would be relocating to the woman’s geographic area, and falsely represented that he wished to pursue a committed, romantic relationship with each woman. Giblin received money from the women he spoke to on the dating services via interstate wire services such as Western Union and MoneyGram.
In addition to the prison term, Judge Kugler sentenced Giblin to three years of supervised release and ordered him to pay restitution of $23,428.
U.S. Attorney Sellinger credited members of the U.S. Marshals Service, District of New Jersey, under the direction of U.S. Marshal Juan Matos Jr., and special agents of the FBI, Atlantic City Resident Agency, under the direction of Special Agent in Charge James E. Dennehy in Newark, with the investigation leading to today’s sentencing.
The government is represented by Assistant U.S. Attorney Daniel A. Friedman of the U.S. Attorney’s Office’s Criminal Division in Camden.