Steve Bannon perhaps Washington’s most infamous grifter has been arrested on a few fraud charges related to his part In the “Build The Wall” GoFundMe campaign. According to reports, federal investigators and police from the USPS (that’s the postal service guys) arrested Bannon on his $28m yacht off the coast of CT.
Bannon and at least three others were indicted and charged by prosecutors in New York for allegedly swindling hundreds-of-thousands of dollars out of would-be donors. Those donors notably had been told that all of the funds to the “Build The Wall” campaign would go towards such — but instead it was split up between the men.
The arrest also captured Brian Kalfage the longtime grifter who had originally set up the apparent wide-ranging scam online. Prosecutors allege that alike Bannon, Kalfage illegally used the funds totalling $350,000 or more on various luxury items: cosmetic surgery, a luxury SUV, a golf cart, payments toward a boat, home renovations, jewelry, personal tax payments and credit card debt.
“As alleged, the defendants defrauded hundreds of thousands of donors, capitalizing on their interest in funding a border wall to raise millions of dollars, under the false pretense that all of that money would be spent on construction,” Acting Manhattan US Attorney Audrey Strauss said in a statement per CNN. “While repeatedly assuring donors that Brian Kolfage, the founder and public face of We Build the Wall, would not be paid a cent, the defendants secretly schemed to pass hundreds of thousands of dollars to Kolfage, which he used to fund his lavish lifestyle.”
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