A successful American businesswoman's life was turned upside down after falling for a drug trafficking scam that landed her in prison in Peru.

Patricia Baronowski-Schneider suffered a traumatic brain injury following a skydiving accident that left her in hospital for a month.

Speaking to the Daily Star, she said certain parts of her brain were not functioning correctly long after she recovered physically. "Someone described it as like swiss cheese – the brain seems normal in many aspects but then there are certain aspects that are missing," she explained. "There were certain things that weren’t clicking – due to that I was falling for scam after scam after scam."

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One of these scams led her to Peru in 2017 under the guise of a business trip. The scammers told Patricia they worked for the International Monetary Fund and invited her on a new programme for entrepreneurs. She was then told to get on a plane with luggage for a man she was to meet in Hong Kong, but was swarmed by police at the airport. They sawed the luggage open and found cocaine.

"They were looking for me before I even got there because they knew what time I would be arriving for my flight," Patricia said. "They get money for every foreigner they arrest."

Patricia presented proof of her brain injury and the scam but it wouldn't save her. She recalls one of the judges "playing on his phone" during her trial. She was eventually told "plead innocent one more time and it will be 15 years, plead not innocent and we’ll go for less”. She said: "They basically gave me no choice but to plead guilty to something that I’m not guilty of."

Patricia spent the next four years in custody at prisons in Callao, Ancón and Lima. She also spent time in house arrest after her Peruvian lawyer promised it would count as time off her sentence. It didn't.

Patricia said: "I was in rat and cockroach-infested rooms sleeping on the floor. There’s mice, rats and cockroaches crawling all over you. You had to take ice cold showers every single day. There was hardly any water. It was just insane."

Often her toilet was just a hole in the floor, shared between 18 to 22 other inmates. Among her cell mates were murderers, one of whom had "killed her kids and chopped them up into pieces". There were also other foreigners, including Americans, who had fallen victim to similar scams.

"There were butcher knives, everything you wanted there, so I was contemplating ending it," the grandmother said. "The only thing that was helping me keep going was a note sent by my son."

She described the Peruvian prison system as a "business", where Americans are "walking ATMs". Prisoners have to pay to work to have their sentences reduced, and the products of their labour are then flogged by officials for cash.

Patricia said the US embassy in Peru was "completely useless" throughout this whole ordeal, only speaking to her once a year. This was the same for the other Americans she met on the inside. She was even quizzed and strip-searched by police back in the US when she was eventually released from prison in 2021.

Patricia is now rebuilding her firm, Pristine Advisors, which suffered massively and lost clients while she was trapped in Peru. She explained: "I always treat the clients like they’re my babies - when someone else is running the company, they treat it like a job. It didn’t take long for the clients to realise something wasn’t right, and they wound up leaving."

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