SAN JOSE, Costa Rica (AP) — Authorities have captured an American man accused of running telemarketing schemes that bilked costumers in the United States and Jamaica out of more than $18 million, police said yesterday.

Michigan native Paul Ronald Wick was captured by Costa Rican and Interpol authorities in the San Jose suburb of Escazu on Friday. The 41-year-old faces US charges of electronic fraud and money laundering in the amount of more than $18 million and is accused of running telemarketing firms that peddled phantom products in Texas and Georgia.

With US authorities searching for him in the late 1990s, the FBI said Wick fled to Jamaica where he ran a new telemarketing scheme for more than a year. When police there became suspicious, Wick fled to Costa Rica where he has been laying low since early 2000, local authorities said in a statement.

Wick came to prominence in Jamaica after Sharpe Communications Ltd (SCL), a Montego Bay-based call centre with which he was affiliated, started shaving its workforce in August last year, sparking rumours that the telemarketing firm was closing down and angering employees. It emerged during that dispute that Wick was wanted by the FBI for money laundering and wire fraud.

At the time, John Stanbury, a senior executive at the company’s headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia, denied that the firm was closing Stanbury also denied media reports that Wick owned SCL, saying that the fugitive was only an employee.

“Mr Wick was never the owner of the company, he was merely employed as a consultant,” Stanbury said.