In December 2024, the FBI arrested the CEO, VP, and an associate of PageTurner Press and Media, one of the most prolific and predatory of the many Philippine publishing scams. The government determined that over the course of six years, PageTurner–which did business in the Philippines under the name Innocentrix–defrauded nearly 900 writers of more than $48 million.
The gears of US justice grind slowly (especially these days), but in early May, PageTurner CEO Michael Cris Traya Sordilla pleaded guilty to one count of wire fraud and one of money laundering. Although each count carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison, the government’s sentencing guidelines in Sordilla’s plea agreement suggest he will serve much less time.
The plea agreement also requires Sordilla to pay millions of dollars in restitution to his victims. Will anyone ever receive those payments, though? Today’s guest post by retired Professor of Economics Trent Bertrand takes a look at that question, using the PageTurner prosecution as a lens to examine how the prevalence of plea bargains in US criminal prosecutions often serves the needs of prosecutors and defense attorneys rather than the victims of all-too-common frauds. For Mr. Bertrand, the issue is not abstract, as you’ll see from his bio at the bottom of this post.
Can a Flawed US Legal System Discourage Fraud?
by Trent Bertrand
Scams have become so commonplace in the United States that the vast majority are never investigated or prosecuted. Though various administrations have highlighted the need to address widespread fraud, little attention has been given to a basic flaw in the US criminal legal system in either deterring fraud or bringing justice to its victims.
Most criminal prosecutions (some 96-98%) result in plea bargains rather than jury trials. It is not much of an exaggeration to suggest that the trial by jury criminal justice system has been replaced by a plea bargain system. The flaw in the system results from what the economics literature calls the ‘principal agent’ problem, where the incentives for the agents empowered to implement systems or policies do not align well with the principal goals of those systems or policies. The plea bargain system is better designed to meet the goals of the agents negotiating these pleas, i.e. the prosecutors and the defense attorneys, than it is in meeting the twin goals of deterring similar crimes and bringing justice to the victims.
The key feature of the system is a combination of sentencing guidelines that fall far short of the maximum sentences for the offenses being charged. This part of the plea bargain fully meets the needs of prosecutors to obtain guilty pleas without the risks and costs of trials, and for the defense attorneys to charge high fees for protecting their clients from the threat of those statutory maximum jail sentences. Plea bargains in fraud cases also include ‘orders for restitution’ for the victims, but with little incentive for the fraudsters to pay restitution, especially if the main culprits have laundered the money abroad and have returned to their home country.
In this article, I illustrate just how flawed the system is based on the likely outcome of the prosecution under way in San Diego of four defendants in the PageTurner Press and Media scam.
Arrests, a Guilty Plea, and a Problem of Enforcement
This scam took advantage of elderly authors anxious to get their works more widely recognized. The lead conspirator, Michael Cris Traya Sordilla, operated a call center from the Philippines to bilk some 800+ mainly senior authors of about $48 million with false claims about having their works published and marketed by reputable publishers or highlighted in films and telvision series.
Against the odds, three of the conspirators were arrested in San Diego in December of 2024, with a fourth indicted a year later, in December 2025. Three of them remain in custody.
On April 16, 2026, Sordilla signed a plea bargain arranged by the prosecutor Oleksandra Johnson and the Defense Attornery Antonio Yoon [USA vs.Michael Cris Traya Sordilla, Case No. 24CR2712-JLS, Plea Agreement, Filed May 6,2026, S.D. California]. The Sordilla plea bargain includes a recommended sentence based on the Federal guidelines for sentencing established for the two offenses, wire/mail fraud and money laundering. While the statutory maximum is 40 years in prison, the recommended sentence by the negotiating parties in the Sordilla plea is 33 months in prison. The actual sentence is at the sole discretion of the presiding judge but the record shows that the judges often reduce rather than enhance the recommended sentence.
Sordilla has been in custody since he was arrested in December of 2024. If, as is customary, he is given credit for time already served, he may have at most a few months more in jail if the plea bargain sentencing recommendations are accepted by the judge.
The government also confiscated over 6 million dollars held by the firms set up by the defendants as part of their scam. Sordilla ordered his coconspirators to launder some $42 million for deposit in bank accounts in the Philippines and, as part of the plea agreement will pay the $2.7 million that he claimed to have personally received as a fine.
What is in this plea bargain for the victims? Sordilla also agreed to an order of restitution of some $48.7 million equal to the amount known to have been fraudulently extracted from the victims. This may turn out to be just another gift to lawyers who may be hired by victims to try without much prospect of success to enforce the order of restitution with both the money and the culprits already outside the United States. The result of the plea bargain could well be a get out of jail card for a main conspirator soon to be living back in the Philippines with access to the bulk of the $42 million laundered abroad.
The DOJ’s announcement of the plea bargain [US Attorney’s Office, S.D. California, “Defendant Pleads Guilty in $48 Million Nationwide Book Publishing Scam Targeting Hundreds of Seniors”, May 7, 2026} puts a rosy spin on the outcome. US Attorney Adam Gordon is quoted as saying “The defendants didn’t just steal money- they stole dreams leaving victims with empty promises and devastating losses. Today’s guilty plea delivers justice for the victims…”. Special Agent in Charge Mark Remily of the FBI San Diego Field Office is quoted as saying “Today’s guilty plea is the beginning of holding all those involved in this Hollywood dream scheme accountable for their crimes. FBI San Diego, along with our law enforcement partners, remains steadfast in our pursuit of justice of any scammers attempting to steal Americans’ hard-earned money.” Would that it were true! A jail term of three years in prison and unenforceable order of restitution is a poor excuse for justice.
What Might Better Serve PageTurner (and Other) Fraud Victims?
Is there hope that common sense justice might be salvaged from this flawed system?
As with all federal plea bargains, the judge has the final say on sentencing and the defendant does not have a right to change his guilty plea. A solution would be to sentence the defendant to a significantly longer jail sentence, with parole or supervised release in line with the present guidelines contingent on meeting reasonable levels of restitution. There is scope for doing this under the present system, but the fly in the ointment is the short sentences prescribed under the guidelines. If Sordilla is facing just a few more months in prison, there is little incentive for him to scramble to fund the restitution fund in order to gain parole a few months ahead of his scheduled release.
The judge could set aside the plea agreement sentencing recommendation and impose a much longer sentence. In the PageTurner case, Sordilla is obligated under an addendum to the plea agreement to disclose all assets he owns or has transferred to other parties since the commencement of the scam. He is reportedly a very wealthy businessman in the Philippines, owner of several enterprises and well known for his philanthropic activities. A good starting point for putting common sense back into the system would be a lengthy sentence, say 30 years instead of the statutory maximum of 40 years, with parole provided in line with the present sentencing guidelines conditional on payment of a substantial restitution, perhaps $30 million rather than the unenforceable $48.7 million he agreed to in the plea bargain.
Such a sentence would provide the missing incentive for Sordilla to come up with the restitution funds, even if this implied the same sort of ‘devastating losses’ he imposed on his victims. This decision might be appealed by Sordilla, since the plea bargain gives Sordilla the right to appeal a sentence far out of line with the sentencing guidelines or to claim ineffective counsel, the two exceptions to the ‘no appeal’ rule included in the plea agreement. But appeals can fail, and such an action by the judge could bring justice to the victims.
Relying on a courageous judge to use his or her power over sentencing to create a significant incentive for the culprit to provide restitution funds may be wishful thinking. As emphasized in this analysis, the plea bargain system is designed to meet the needs of agents often more interested in racking up a conviction while minimizing demands on prosecutorial, court and prison resources than in providing justice to the victims. If justice is to be had in the PageTurner scam, the judge would have to craft the needed tools on his or her own and deviate from the Federal sentencing guidelines, albeit for a good reason. That is why the legal system for addressing fraud is inherently flawed. Unless the present system of sentencing guidelines is reformed to provide parole or supervised release only after the order of restitution is satisfied, the present legal system will continue to fail to provide deterrence to fraud or justice for its victims.
The lack of incentives for funding restitution by the guilty fraudsters is not the only flaw in the system. The legal literature also highlights the use of the system to entice innocent parties to plead guilty with greatly reduced sentences via plea bargains rather than to face the possibility of much harsher penalties at trial [Carissa Byrne Hessick’s book, Punishment Without Trial: Why Plea Bargaining is a Bad Deal provides an example]. This has some similar characteristics to the flaw analyzed in this article, in that this racks up recorded convictions for prosecutors and successful mitigation of potentially harsher sentences by defense attorneys without deterring crime or bringing justice to the victims.
What would a sensible reform of the dominant plea bargain justice system for fraud look like if incentives with the goals of a commonsense justice system were not so misaligned? A starting point would be to recognize the dominance of plea bargains and specifically define the sentencing guidelines as a recommendation for parole or supervised release conditional on meeting all the conditions of the plea bargain, including satisfaction of the order of restitution. Such an outcome would not be an outlier based on a single judge refusing to see deterrence of crime and justice for victims swept aside. The revised Federal Guidelines would instead create a strong incentive for the those admitting guilt to make restitution to their victims for their crimes.
Trent Bertrand is a retired Professor of Economics who has taught at the Johns Hopkins University, Cornell University, Queen’s University, McGill University, the State University of New York at Binghamton, Princeton University, Vanderbilt University, the University of Hawaii as well as participating in University Development Programs at Thammasat University in Thailand with Ford and Rockefeller Foundation support. A close friend and colleague of his at the SUNY Binghamton Department of Economics passed away with a broken spirit due to a belated realization that he had fallen victim to the PageTurner fraudsters.
