Laguna Beach Man Arrested in Telemarketing Scheme : Crime: The suspect was previously convicted of boiler room fraud, police say. This time, he allegedly asked ‘prize winner’ for a large processing fee.

A Laguna Beach man previously convicted of boiler room fraud in Orange County was arrested again for allegedly telling people to send money for prizes they supposedly had won, police said Wednesday.

Police said James Alan Winter, 31, called people on mailing lists he bought and told them they had won a valuable prize or trip in a contest. To claim it, they had to send a $150 or $200 processing fee to his Fountain Valley mailbox, said Police Sgt. Dann Bean. Winter would then send the person a cheap gift such as a camera or bracelet, Bean said.

Police estimated that Winter’s “International Catalog Company” took in at least $35,000 in the three or four months it operated.

“This scheme is a very, very common one,” said Darwin Wisdom, a special agent with the FBI and coordinator of the San Diego Boiler Room Task Force.

In 1988, Winter pleaded guilty to running a fraudulent telemarketing operation in Santa Ana. He was arrested again in Costa Mesa in 1990 on suspicion of doing the same thing.

“He’s pretty well-known,” Costa Mesa Police Detective Steve Labbitt said at the time. “He’s been working boiler rooms for a while.”

Four weeks ago, a person called by Winters contacted Fountain Valley police, and they began investigating.

At about noon on Tuesday, Winter was arrested at Mail Annex, a private Fountain Valley mailbox office, where he had waited for Federal Express to come, said manager Dennis Ryan. Winter had been renting a mailbox there for the past six months, Ryan said.

Using Federal Express instead of regular mail allows suspects to avoid the mail fraud charges, which are ordinarily five-year prison sentences, Wisdom said.

Winter was booked on suspicion of fraudulent telemarketing sales, a felony, and is being held in the Huntington Beach jail on $200,000 bond.