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The FBI Wants to Know If You Got Scammed by The SantaCon Guy
They're making a list, but it's unclear how many times they'll check it
By now, it should be abundantly clear that SantaCon, the demonic daylong drunken bar crawl collectively (barely) tolerated only because of its alleged philanthropy, was, in fact, very likely a con all along.
Earlier this week, Feds arrested Stefan Pildes, the president of the non-profit that runs SantaCon, charging the organization’s Santa Prime with wire fraud. Pildes is accused of diverting the bulk of the $2.7 million raised through SantaCon events, dating back to “at least 2019,” into a personal slush fund, not charities, and allegedly spending the money on hilariously conspicuous vacations, concert tickets, vehicles, cryptocurrency, and maybe even a Burning Man trip or two, according to a 2023 Gothamist investigation (the official indictment adds renovations to a lakefront home in New Jersey).
Now, the FBI is making a list of Pildes’ victims, from individual SantaCon attendees (thousands of whom spent as much as $17 per badge last year alone) to businesses that participated in the bar crawl (who slid more than $675,000 in commissions to the organization). It’s encouraging those who may have been impacted by Pildes’ apparent grift to add their names through a form posted on an official government site. “Victims may be eligible for certain services, restitution, and rights under federal and/or state law,” the site reads, noting the information would aid the investigation.
SantaCon debuted in New York in 1998, after launching in San Francisco four years earlier, and hasn’t missed a year since. In 2019, the city came down on Pildes for the havoc it wrought on the neighborhoods it stomped through, and rather than asking the tens of thousands of red-suited Santas to curb their jolliness, Pildes started a very official-sounding non-profit called Participatory Safety Inc., and tucked the event under it as a fundraiser for various charities. A press release on the indictment claims Pildes skimmed “more than half of the charitable proceeds” from the money collected.
