Love it or hate it, SantaCon has become a worldwide phenomenon. The revelrous tradition that began as a Cacophony Society project in San Francisco in 1994 has expanded across the globe. It now takes place in dozens of cities, with a particularly fervent community in New York City, which in the past decade has become the de facto ground zero for the event.
However, it appears that the charitable foundation of New York City’s SantaCon may have been fraudulent.
On Wednesday, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York filed charges against New York City SantaCon president Stefan Pildes, alleging that he misrepresented the charitable angle of the event: “Instead of donating the millions of dollars he raised, he ran his own con game,” U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton said in a news release.
The indictment says that between 2019 and 2024, Pildes raised at least $2.7 million under the guise of charitable intentions, but that more than half of those funds were diverted to a personal “slush fund.” The donations came from tens of thousands of individuals, who pay between $10 and $20 for access to SantaCon venues. The indictment adds that the New York City edition of SantaCon regularly drew upward of 25,000 attendees, resulting in over $2 million in ticket sales and over $675,000 in charitable contributions from venues (10-25% of their sales).
According to the indictment, Pildes told one attendee over email that “your donation goes to charity and it is only a few bucks and that good feeling will warm your heart faster than whiskey and gingerbread.”
The indictment asserts that Pildes took more than half of these earnings and spent them on an extravagant lifestyle. His spending included $365,000 in renovations to a lakefront property in New Jersey, concert tickets, luxury vacations in Hawaii, Las Vegas and Vail, a $3,000 birthday dinner at a Manhattan Michelin-starred restaurant, $124,000 on leasing a luxury Manhattan apartment and a $100,000 investment in a resort in Costa Rica.
If convicted on the one count of wire fraud, Pildes faces up to 20 years in prison. The court is currently seeking to identify potential victims, who can register at an FBI website.