Each December, New York City is overrun with SantaCon attendees for one day. The event finds more than 20,000 people participating in an annual bar crawl throughout the city while dressed in their best holiday attire, tackiest Santa Claus costumes, and ugliest Christmas swears. It may be an annoyance to some residents, but it’s for a good cause. A portion of proceeds for the ticketed event are donated to charity organizations — at least, they’re supposed to be.
On Wednesday, April 15, SantaCon organizer and president Stefan Pildes was charged with one count of wire fraud. Pildes, 50, is accused of funneling more than $1 million into personal expenses from the $2.7 million raised for charity through SantaCon between 2019 and 2024.
“Stefan Pildes, the president of SantaCon, allegedly pocketed over half of the proceeds generated by his nonprofit to make personal purchases,” FBI Assistant Director in Charge James C. Barnacle, Jr. said in a statement. “Pildes allegedly stole Christmas from tens of thousands of victims and deprived local charities of more than one million dollars. The FBI continues to root out scrooges that greedily exploit the goodwill of New Yorkers.”
According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Southern District of New York, “SantaCon events from 2019 to 2024 generated approximately $2.7 million in proceeds, including over $2 million in ticket sales and over $675,000 in charitable commissions from Venues.” The bars that participated as official stops on the SantaCon route typically agreed to put between 10 percent and 25 percent of food and beverage sales from the event towards charitable donations.
“Pildes donated only a small fraction of the millions of dollars he raised for charity. Instead, Pildes siphoned off more than half of the charitable proceeds to an entity that Pildes controlled, Creative Opportunities Group, Inc. (‘COG’), that had no public connection to SantaCon, where he used these funds freely to finance various personal ventures,” the indictment reads. “Pildes also abused his control over PSI’s bank accounts to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars of the remaining proceeds for his own personal use.”
It’s unclear whether Pildes had retained a lawyer. A rep for SantaCon did not immediately return Rolling Stone‘s request for comment.
Pildes, who resides in New Jersey, faces a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison if convicted.
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