George Santos Accused Of Scamming Amish Out Of Puppies. Seriously.

What a schmuck.

Let us spin the giant Price Is Right carnival wheel and see what past shenanigans wacky goober George Santos has to answer questions about today.

Santos ALLEGEDLY (spins wheel)wrote bad checks to (spins wheel)Amish dog breeders in (spins wheel)Pennsylvania for (spins wheel)an "adopt don't shop" event. The charges were eventually (spins wheel)expunged from his record after he (spins wheel)convinced prosecutors he worked for (spins wheel) the SEC and this was enough to get him off the hook somehow.

 According to Politico, in 2019 Santos ran into Tiffany Bogosian, a New York lawyer and friend of his from middle school. Not long after that, he asked for her help when the NYPD knocked on his door with a Pennsylvania extradition warrant. He told the lawyer that back in 2017, he had lost one of four checkbooks he got when he opened an account with a TD Bank branch in Queens.

As soon as Santos realized he had lost the checkbook, he called the bank and canceled any checks written against it. Not long after that, he closed the account without ever finding out that someone had cashed nine bad checks on it.

Bogosian sent a letter to the Pennsylvania State Police complete with copies of the cancelled checks on which several of the signatures didn’t match. She also sent in a copy of Santos’s driver’s license, which also allegedly did not match the signature on any of the checks. Later, Santos went to Pennsylvania and gave the police the whole spiel about working for the government and convincing them he’d been the victim of fraud.

The police apparently found Santos convincing enough that they dropped the charge of theft by deception lodged against him and expunged his record.

This guy! He’s like a Jim Thompson character written by Dave Barry.

A few days after the Amish dog breeders tried to cash one of the checks, Santos held an adoption event at a pet store in New York for his alleged charity Friends of Pets United. Which, according to the New York   Times, is where something else shady occurred :

 But then the charity’s leader made an odd request: He insisted that the store owner give him the proceeds in a check made out to his name, Anthony Devolder. 

 The owner refused and made the check payable to the charity, Friends of Pets United. Days later, when he looked at his bank records, he noticed that the check had been altered: The charity’s name had been blotted out. “When it cashed, it was crossed out, and it had Anthony Devolder written on it,” the owner, Daniel Avissato, said. 

Oh yeah, he was using his Anthony Devolder identity, nothing weird about any of this.

ERMAGERD!! PUPPIES!!!  

If you’re keeping score, we now have Santos using his apparently fake, never-registered-as-a-nonprofit-or-rescue-group dog rescue charity to scam money out of a homeless veteran and the Amish. What’s next, a nursing home? A children’s hospital? An orphanage? A combination nursing-home-children’s-hospital-orphanage funded strictly by charitable donations and run by an order of nuns?

Then again, it's a guy who apparently needed puppies for his puppy raffle to benefit the cause of not buying dogs from breeders, but we guess he didn't so much "buy them" if he never intended money to change hands? Or some unknown person could have stolen his checks and gone to the breeder, we suppose. It is a puzzle!

The grifting extended down to volunteers to the charity, according to Politico :

 After Vazzo adopted her puppy, Santos asked her to volunteer for his charity to foster dogs and coordinate adoption events. She grew disillusioned with him after she said she fostered an estimated 30 dogs in one month, but the only help Santos offered was some money for paper towels. 

Thirty dogs in one month? We hope that that's exaggerated. George Santos offering nothing but a couple of rolls of Bounty to help with even one dog? That, sadly, sounds very believable.

[ Politico / New York Times ]

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