Politico has a juicy scoop tonight: George Santos is being accused of having run an interstate credit card skimming operation in 2017. The gist: Gustavo Ribeiro Trelha, who was convicted of using credit card skimming devices to obtain card numbers and cameras to secure the passwords to them, has given a sworn statement to the FBI that his boss in the scheme was none other than George Santos/Anthony Devolder/Anthony Zabrovsky/Kitara.
“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,” Gustavo Ribeiro Trelha wrote in the declaration. It was sent by express mail and email to the FBI, the U.S. Secret Service New York office and the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Eastern District of New York, according to a copy of the receipt from the United States Postal Service.
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“Santos taught me how to skim card information and how to clone cards. He gave me all the materials and taught me how to put skimming devices and cameras on ATM machines,” Trelha said in the declaration that was submitted to authorities by his New York attorney, Mark Demetropoulos. POLITICO obtained a copy of the declaration.
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“Santos gave me at his warehouse, some of the parts to illegally skim credit card information. Right after he gave me the card skimming and cloning machines, he taught me how to use them,” Trelha wrote.
Trelha claims that he and Santos split the proceeds from the operation 50/50. He also claims that Santos visited him in jail and warned Trelha not to implicate him, saying that with Santos a citizen and Trelha already in jail for the crime, the authorities would believe him, Santos. Santos also threatened to get Trelha’s friends in Orlando deported if Trelha implicated him. (Trelha himself was deported to Brazil after his conviction).
Santos spoke at Trelha’s trial claiming he was a “family friend” there to secure lodging for Trelha if the defendant got off. This was when Santos falsely swore, under oath, that he was employed at Goldman Sachs.
CBS News reported last month that Santos had been questioned in the case, but no charges filed. Now, with Trelha offering sworn testimony to federal and state investigators (and giving a great deal of detail in the declaration, which his lawyer shared with Politico), perhaps there will be some new movement in the Secret Service’s still-open investigation.
While not the strangest chapter of The Six Faces of Representative Santos, this new story is certainly intriguing and well worth a closer look by the relevant authorities.
Watch this space.