George Santos Had Role in A.T.M. Fraud Scheme, Former Roommate Says

[maestrob]

The former roommate, who pleaded guilty in 2017 and was deported, sent an affidavit to federal authorities accusing Mr. Santos of running a card-skimming operation.

By Michael Gold and Grace Ashford
March 10, 2023

In April 2017, the Seattle police arrested a Brazilian man they had caught installing a card-skimming machine on an A.T.M. near the famed Pike Place Market. As officers investigated, they connected the man to a Florida address where he once lived with George Santos, now a Republican congressman from New York.

The man, Gustavo Ribeiro Trelha, pleaded guilty to a federal fraud charge in the case and was ultimately deported to Brazil. Mr. Santos was not implicated or charged, but he later told a lawyer that he had been questioned by the Seattle police, and he flew across the country to testify at a bail hearing on Mr. Trelha’s behalf.

On Wednesday, Mr. Trelha sought to drastically change the narrative of the case. In an affidavit that he submitted to the federal authorities, he accused Mr. Santos of leading the operation and said the two had agreed to split the profits in half. Mr. Trelha contended that he had not disclosed this previously because Mr. Santos had threatened his friends.

“I am coming forward today to declare that the person in charge of the crime of credit card fraud when I was arrested was George Santos/Anthony Devolder,” Mr. Trelha wrote in his statement, which was first reported by Politico and sent to the F.B.I., the Secret Service and the U.S. attorney’s office in Brooklyn.

Mr. Santos, who at times has used his middle name, Anthony, and his mother’s last name, Devolder, characterized the accusation as just the “newest insanity,” writing on Twitter on Thursday that the claims were “categorically false.”

He added that he would “entertain sitting down” and discussing Mr. Trelha’s accusations with “any news organization willing to do good journalism.” A spokeswoman in Mr. Santos’s House office did not respond to a request for an interview.

Mr. Santos has acknowledged his past ties to Mr. Trelha. According to a recording published by Politico, he flew to Seattle to testify on Mr. Trelha’s behalf at a bail hearing, saying the two were “family friends.”


It was unclear whether federal officials would examine Mr. Trelha’s allegations. A spokesman for the Secret Service said the agency had received the declaration but declined further comment. A spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office in Brooklyn declined to comment.

Mr. Santos, a Republican who represents parts of Long Island and Queens, is already facing inquiries from federal and local prosecutors in the wake of reporting by The New York Times that revealed that he had falsified parts of his background and work experience during his campaign, and that found significant irregularities in his campaign’s fund-raising and spending practices.

Prosecutors in Brazil have also revived a criminal case against him in which he admitted to check fraud in 2008. He also faced theft charges in Pennsylvania in 2017 over bad checks he wrote to dog breeders, although the case was later dismissed and expunged, according to a lawyer who assisted Mr. Santos at the time.

The charges were dropped after Mr. Santos’s lawyer told law enforcement authorities that his checkbook had been stolen and that he believed the Pennsylvania episode was tied to a credit-fraud case in Seattle.

The exact nature of Mr. Santos’s involvement in the Seattle case is unclear. Although he told the lawyer, Tiffany Bogosian, that he had acted as an informant for the police, Mr. Santos’s name does not appear in police or court records.

Seattle police records obtained by The Times show that officers were called to an A.T.M. after a Chase Bank investigator reported seeing footage of a man arriving there for three consecutive days at 6:30 a.m. to install an illegal card-reading device that he would then retrieve later in the evening.

When the police arrived, they found and arrested Mr. Trelha, who had “numerous fraudulent credit cards,” a police report said. When officers searched his car, they found empty FedEx packaging with a return address in Winter Park, Fla., an Orlando suburb.

Mr. Santos lived and worked in Orlando briefly. In October 2016, he was issued a ticket in the area for failing to stop at a red light; the summons listed Mr. Santos’s address as the Winter Park apartment that was later listed on Mr. Trelha’s package.

Mr. Santos’s name was not on the FedEx package, and federal court documents and police records do not mention him as being involved in the skimming operation. In court filings, Mr. Trelha said he told the police he was part of a larger operation being run out of Brazil.

But in the declaration he filed this week, Mr. Trelha said Mr. Santos taught him “how to skim card information and how to clone cards.” He also said that Mr. Santos had a warehouse in Orlando with the machines and materials necessary to conduct the scheme, and that the two had agreed to split profits equally.

“It didn’t work out so well,” Mr. Trelha said in the declaration, “because I was arrested.”

In the declaration, Mr. Trelha said Mr. Santos later visited him in jail and urged Mr. Trelha not to mention him, then later “threatened” Mr. Trelha’s friends in an effort to keep Mr. Trelha quiet. He also said Mr. Santos had stolen money that Mr. Trelha had collected to pay his $75,000 bail.

Mr. Trelha told Politico in an interview that he worried Mr. Santos would have his friends in Orlando deported. He said in his affidavit that he wanted to come forward after seeing Mr. Santos on television in recent months.

In the recording of Mr. Trelha’s bail hearing, Mr. Santos also told the judge he worked at Goldman Sachs, though, as The Times has reported, he did not.

The lawyer who filed the statement on Mr. Trelha’s behalf, Mark Demetropolous, did not respond to messages seeking comment. A call to his office number went to a law firm run by Grant Lally, a one-time Republican congressional candidate who runs a Long Island newspaper that cast some doubt on some of Mr. Santos’s claims during his 2022 campaign.

It was not clear how Mr. Demetropolous, who describes himself on LinkedIn as a corporate and tax lawyer, became involved with Mr. Trelha’s case.

Rebecca Davis O’Brien contributed reporting.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/10/nyre ... mming.html