A new report implicates out Rep. George Santos (R-NY) in yet another scandal – this one involving a credit card fraud ring.
According to a report from CBS News, Santos was interviewed by police in 2017 after a Brazilian man named Gustavo Ribeiro Trelha was caught with a credit card skimming device at a Chase Bank in Seattle. The nature of the interview or why Santos was questioned is unknown. It is unknown if he was ever suspected of being involved in the crime.
Trelha was a resident of Orlando, Florida at the time, and when police searched his car, they found an empty FedEx package with a return address of a former home of Santos in Winter Park, Florida.
Police connected Trelha to a massive operation run by a group in both Florida and Brazil involving hundreds of stolen credit cards.
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Creating further questions is that, in Trelha’s sentencing memorandum, there is a letter from someone named “Leide Santos” who says she is Trelha’s girlfriend. She said they started a business together in Florida, though CBS News found no record of that happening, nor could they find anyone with the name “Leide Santos” that matched her description. The publication also said there is nothing proving she is related to George Santos.
An acquaintance of Santos said he told them in 2020 he was a confidential informant for the case but is now unsure if that’s true.
Tiffany Bogosian, a childhood friend, said Santos admitted he spoke with the police about the investigation and that “he believed that the warrant had something to do with a prior incident where he was an informant for the Seattle Police Department, for, you know, a fraudulent kind of ring of, like, credit-card making and things like that.”
To add yet another layer to Santos’s tangled web, Bogosian said Santos told her this while she was offering him friendly advice related to a different debacle in which Santos had found himself. In 2017, he was charged with theft after multiple bad checks in his name were written to dog breeders only days after Santos held a pet adoption event with his charity, Friends of Pets United. The legitimacy of that charity has since been called into question.
The charges against Santos were dismissed after he said his checkbook had been stolen.
After being elected to represent New York’s Third Congressional District and becoming the first out gay Republican elected to Congress, Santos’ life story came crumbling down as several newspapers reported he never went to the colleges he said he attended, never worked for the major banks he said he worked for, and that he had been lying about his family history as well. He has admitted to many of these lies, calling them “a little bit of fluff” on his resume.
Santos admitted that he lied about graduating from Baruch College and New York University, working directly for Citigroup and Goldman Sachs, and living at a fake address in his congressional district. He provided no additional proof to back up claims that his grandparents escaped the Holocaust and that he lost four employees in the June 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting.
The embattled Congressman also recently announced he would temporarily step down from his committee assignments amid reports of an active criminal investigation into his campaign finances.
A recent Newsday-Siena College poll found that 78 percent of congressmembers from New York and the Nassau County Republican Party have also called on him to resign.
