AZTEC, N.M. — A man has been sentenced to five years' probation for bilking people out of $13,000 by selling "California Red Superworms" that he claimed ate nuclear waste.
Judge George Harrison on Wednesday also ordered Thomas Stanley Huntington to repay his victims.
Huntington, 52, of Farmington, pleaded no contest last month to six counts of fraud and one count of issuing a worthless check.
He was accused of bilking at least a dozen people by selling them worms he said would be resold to the federal government's unopened nuclear waste burial site near Carlsbad.
He told would-be worm entrepreneurs they could use them as breeding stock, raise more worms, then "make big money" selling them back to him for the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. Huntington sold the worms for $500 per 4 pounds.
