Controversial Rep. George Santos is reportedly facing new allegations that he led a criminal credit card skimming ring in the latest damaging accusation to rock the freshman Long Island lawmaker.
An ex-con former roommate of Santos told authorities that the freshman Republican was the mastermind of a 2017 identity theft scheme that they both took part in, Politico reported.
“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,” Gustavo Ribeiro Trelha said in a sworn affidavit sent to investigators this week.
Trelha, a Brazilian immigrant who once lived with Santos in Florida, was convicted and served several months in prison for stealing credit cards in Seattle. He was later deported.
He now says he was afraid of fingering Santos at the time for fear of retaliation against relatives who were undocumented immigrants.
“I learned from him how to clone ATM and credit cards,” Trelha wrote in the statement. “He had a lot of material — parts, printers, blank ATM and credit cards to be painted and engraved with stolen account and personal information.”
Santos, who faces myriad probes into his checkered past and lies, denied the report as “the newest insanity” and “categorically false.”
He promised to “go over it all” with journalists without elaborating.
Santos was previously questioned about the Seattle scheme by federal investigators but was not charged.
He testified on Trelha’s behalf at his arraignment, falsely telling a judge under oath that he worked for the investment bank Goldman Sachs.
In 2022, Santos portrayed himself as a trailblazing conservative gay immigrant on his way to winning a Democratic-leaning district on Long Island’s North Shore and a slice of Queens.
He later admitted to lying extensively about going to college, working for big investment banks and that his grandparents were Jews who fled the Holocaust.
He is also facing criminal investigations, which will likely focus on financial disclosures like his claim that he personally loaned his campaign $700,000 after supposedly making just $55,000 a year as recently as 2020.
Santos stubbornly refuses to step down from office and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has tacitly stood by him even as fellow New York Republicans mostly shun him.
