• by Erik Sass , Staff Writer @eriksass1, January 4, 2013

Todd Hansen, 49, who served as president of Posterscope USA from 2004-2009, has been sentenced to four months in prison by U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff after pleading guilty in June 2012 to fraud and conspiracy charges related to his tenure at Posterscope. The court also decreed three years of supervised release, and ordered Hansen to pay restitution of $231,000 and a fine of $173,450.90.

Hansen was arrested by the FBI in November 2011 on suspicion of accounting fraud, which included overstating client payments to inflate Posterscope’s financial results over. Also charged was former Posterscope finance director James T. Buckley II, who conspired with Hansen to perpetrate the fraud. The two men inflated Posterscope’s results in order to pay themselves bigger performance-based bonuses; in total they inflated Posterscope’s profits by $20 million over the five-year period Hansen was in charge.

Buckley was previously sentenced to time already served, which amounted to one day, as well as a year of supervised release and restitution of $27,000.

As MediaPost’s Steve McClellan noted in his report earlier this week, Hansen may have received a heavier sentence in part because the investigation by the U.S. Attorney’s office in Manhattan and the FBI also found he had “misused tens of thousands of dollars of company funds to pay for expenses and fees that directly benefitted him, his family, and friends, and that were unrelated to the company’s legitimate business.” However both men escaped with relatively light penalties, considering they could have been sentenced to up to 40 years in prison.

Posterscope is owned by Aegis, which in turn was acquired by Dentsu last year. Aegis previously stated that it “sought and initiated” the investigation and prosecution after uncovering evidence of the fraud.