Guilty of defrauding inventors

The boss of the Federation of Inventors of Quebec is a charlatan who cheated hundreds of people who wanted to patent their ideas, lamented a judge by declaring the fraudster guilty on the whole line.

“In short, the defendant is an imposter who exploits public credibility […]. He acts like a charlatan of the 21^e century,” commented Judge Alexandre Dalmau on Wednesday at the Montreal courthouse.

It is that from 2015 to 2018, Christian Varin, 64, defrauded hundreds of Quebec inventors by making them pay top dollar in order to file patents in their name.

Photos Pierre-Paul Poulin and archives

Its system was also well established with a website as attractive as it was misleading, which presented the federation as an organization dedicated to helping them. Except it was an empty shell, whose only employee was Varin.

The latter thus put his victims in confidence and made them pay out thousands of dollars by promising to assist them, even if he knew nothing of the process for filing patents. The person he paid to write the requests also confided, during the trial, that he wrote “anything” in the documents sent.

A $1.3 million pavilion

“He demonstrated complete incompetence,” said the judge, lamenting that some inventors had even lost the rights to their inventions.

With the money obtained fraudulently, Varin built a luxurious pavilion worth $1.3 million, which he has since rented on the Airbnb platform.

Now that he’s been convicted of fraud, Varin’s future looks a lot less rosy. It would not be surprising if M.^e Nicolas Ammerlaan is asking for his incarceration during sentencing arguments next month, while his flag might be seized.

But for the victims, Friday’s verdict is already a victory in itself.

“The important thing was that he stops, I’m relieved,” commented one of them, who lost regarding $ 10,000 in this case.