reduced sentences on appeal, notably for two YouTube stars

Like a never-ending story: the Eurochallenges case, a long-disappeared marriage agency, returns to the forefront of the legal scene. Because the Lyon Court of Appeal delivered its deliberations on Thursday December 5, 2024 in this case combining organized gang fraud and abuse of weakness. Notably.

Among the approximately 340 civil parties, the retired Deux-Sévrien Jean-Henri Barlet, on behalf of his son who is 80% disabled because he suffers from bipolarity, schizophrenia and Parkinson's disease: the latter, 53 years old today and who lives in Parthenay, was scammed in 2010 by the Nantes branch of Eurochallenges, one of seventeen at the time.

The house specialty? To make vulnerable people dream by offering them profiles of women who were sometimes already married when they existed: they were supposedly from South-East Asia or Eastern Europe. The fifty-year-old from Sévrier had acquired a 62-page catalog for €3,850: the price of the wind.

At first instance, fourteen defendants were convicted by the Lyon criminal court, which delivered its deliberations in 2023: for the five managers and nine employees concerned, the sentences ranged from three months suspended to five years of imprisonment, including three and a half firm. Gaëlle Thonet, alias Sophie Fantasy on social networks, had even been incarcerated for several weeks. Like her husband Grégory, Greg Inside on the Internet, 45 years old like her.

Except that, contrary to the requisitions of the general prosecutor's office, the recent judgment withdrew the firm part of the sanctions hitting the five main defendants, members of the same extended family. The forty-year-old couple received two years of imprisonment with a probationary suspension: they are known for having featured their two children Swan and Néo, other web stars, on the YouTube platform.

“Honestly, I didn’t expect that,” reacted M^e Olivier Martinez, Jean-Henri Barlet's advisor, who traveled to the Rhône on the first of six days of debates last spring. And this, even if the courts also imposed a fine of €100,000 on the aforementioned couple, accompanied by a ban on managing any business for ten years.

The appeal court received all of the victims in their civil party filings. Thus, Mr. Barlet is supposed to receive €5,000 in damages. This is why, in the end, M^e Olivier Martinez shows himself “disappointed on the criminal level”, more “civilly happy”.

“Amazement”

His client displays his “astonishment”, the content of the judgment being “unacceptable” in his eyes: the previous decisions, they, “measured the seriousness of the offenses”.

As early as 2015, Jean-Henri Barlet had obtained, in civil proceedings in Niort, the payment of €4,500 by the marriage agency: the judge had ratified the nullity of the membership contract for “lack of consent”. A sum never paid, the Eurochallenges company having been liquidated in the meantime. Which makes the octogenarian say that he is dealing with “bandits”.