WANNA Marchi became a household name as a television salesperson in the late 1970s.
She earned the title Queen of Teleshopping for selling a wide array of gimmicks from slimming creams to lottery numbers.
Who is Wanna Marchi?
Wanna Marchi was born into a large family with ten siblings in Bologna, Italy.
She worked as a cosmetician in her hometown from applying makeup to the deceased for their funeral to working at nearby salons.
When she was only 18 years old, Marchi married Raimondo Nobile in 1961 and had her daughter, Stefania, and son, Maurizio shortly after.
But toward the end of the 1970s, she was approached to sell products for television shows.
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Although her first two attempts did not go well, on her third attempt, she struck gold.
She started selling a slimming cream, using deprecating comments such as telling her viewers that acne is ugly and gross, but the comments worked.
The slimming cream became one of her bestselling products on the teleshopping networks.
Who is Stefania Nobile?
Stefania Nobile was 32 years old when she set out with her mom to start their own teleshopping show.
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Marchi and Nobile began collaborating with a businessman and moved into products associated with fortune telling.
In May 1996, Nobile, Marchi, and their business partner Mário Pacheco Do Nascimento founded Ascié.
They started selling horoscopes and lottery numbers, claiming Nascimento was clairvoyant and knew which numbers were the winners.
Elderly women were their targets, and telephone operators called, trying to get them to buy the products, claiming they cured drug addictions, tumors, and other sicknesses.
Though none of this was true, people continued to buy the products and if they changed their minds, they were allegedly threatened.
Marchi called Fosca Marcon in 2001, telling her that if she paid €150, she would be sent the winning lottery numbers.
Marcon was dubious about the call, said "No thank you," and hung up, but when she received the same call the following day, she contacted Striscia La Notizia, an Italian news station.
She worked with reporters at the station to record her calls with Marchi and paid the €150 to have Marchi express mail the so-called winning lottery numbers.
The lottery numbers arrived, and along with it was a sealed bag of sea salts with the instructions to dissolve them in a small glass of water in a dark area for a week before playing the numbers.
When unsurprisingly, Marcon did not win the lottery, she called back to complain and was told that the sea salts did not dissolve and there was evil on her side, The Irish Times reported.
She was told that the in-house "wizard," Nascimento, had agreed to prescribe medicine that would rid Marcon of the "evil eye" if she paid them €2,000.
When Marcon refused, The Irish Times reported that Nobile came on the line and threatened her.
She allegedly told her she wishes her "all the evil in the world," and told her: "You'll never sleep another wink as long as you live."
Did Wanna Marchi and Stefania Nobile go to jail?
Marchi and Nobile gained the attention of authorities in November 2001 when Striscia la Notizia looked into Ascié's business practices.
Financial investigators found that Manchi, Nobile, and Nascimento had defrauded more than 300k customers and made more than €33million ($32.6million) over five years.
The three were arrested in January 2002 and charged with fraud. In March of that year, they were released from prison and sentenced to house arrest while they awaited trial.
The trial began in May 2004 and carried on until March 2006 when prosecutor Gaetano Ruta requested Nobile be sentenced to 13 years in prison and asked for Marchi to be sentenced to 12 years and seven years for Nascimento.
During the trial, Ruta said: "Vanna Marchi and Stefania Nobile deserve the qualification of bad guys because they have cultivated the misfortune of others and have sold it, other than talking about lucky numbers of the lot.
Ruta continued: "Stefania Nobile is an example of cowardice because she tried to defend herself by offloading all responsibility on the telephonists who instead acted on the instructions of the two defendants of this trial."
The defense lawyer, Liborio Cataliotti told the jury that he believed Marchi, Nobile, and Nascimento had already been condemned by the media.
Cataliotti said: "In the subsequent trials the story will be brought back to its real dimension and the scams to those poor 116 people will remain, scams that my clients have not committed."
On April 3, 2006, Marchi, Nobile, and Nascimento were sentenced to two years and six months in jail for conspiracy to commit fraud and were sentenced to an additional ten years for other charges.
The three were also required to return more than 2million euros and an additional 40million euros to the victims of the scam.
Where are they now?
Marchi's jail sentence was reduced after an appeal to nine years and six months but was released in October 2012 after six years behind bars.
According to Cinemaholic, Marchi currently lives with her daughter and splits her time between Albania and Milan, Italy.
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Now twenty years after they were arrested, Marchi and Nobile are speaking out in a new Netflix documentary that airs on September 21, 2022.
The documentary, titled Fortune Seller: A TV Scam, explores the early years of Marchi's endeavor into the teleshopping market and expands on the charges brought against them.
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