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New York consultant George Santos has gotten in his justifiable share of outlandish scandals involving ripping off individuals who love dogs — just like the time he reportedly stole $3,000 raised for a veteran whose pit combine wanted surgical procedure, with out which the pet died. But a brand new report reveals that there could also be no restrict to the canine scams he might have pulled earlier than he was elected to the House on a very fraudulent document.
According to information obtained by Politicoin November and December 2017, a checking account in Santos’s title was used to jot down 9 canceled checks for “puppies” to eight completely different individuals in Pennsylvania for $15,125. One of those that acquired the bounced checks was Jacob Stoltzfus, who raises Bichon Frise and Shih Tzu puppies within the village of Bird-in-Hand, and advised Politico that’s how a lot he would have charged for a purebred six years in the past. When not one of the checks have been legitimate, a prosecutor in York County charged Santos with theft by deception — an impressive cost that was on his document the primary time he ran for Congress in 2020.
At some level, Santos realized he wanted to get the allegation off his formal document if he wished to be a politician. According to Politico, he requested a middle-school classmate, legal professional Tiffany Bogosian, to assist him squash the matter. In February 2020, she wrote to a Pennsylvania trooper, telling Santos’s aspect of the story. It was all a misunderstanding, she mentioned: Santos misplaced a checkbook in 2017 and the bogus checks all got here from that e-book. According to Bogosian, Santos even went all the way down to Amish nation every week later and advised prosecutors there he was with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Eventually, the cost was expunged in November 2021.
While Bogosian trusted Santos on the time, she now not believes his story. “I did think it was so weird at the time that his checks didn’t have his address or phone number listed on them,” she advised Politico.
Santos’s canine days have come again to chunk him earlier than: Soon after the story emerged of Santos stealing $3,000 from a veteran fundraising for his dying canine, the FBI reportedly started investigating the matter. And if Santos did really impersonate an SEC agent to get out of a cost, that might put him in an entire new realm of hassle. Even if there are not any authorized repercussions from the allegedly dangerous checks, it appears to be like like Santos has been messing with the fallacious individuals: canine house owners who take the matter of rescue very critically. If the checks have been really written by Santos, it seems he concocted a scheme to purchase puppies in Amish nation, then promote them a couple of days later at adoption occasions in New York, raking it in on adoption charges from dogs that weren’t really in want of rescue.
