SantaCon promoter arrested for charity fraud
Thousands of revelers who dressed as Santa Claus and other famous characters, participate in the annual SantaCon pub crawl on Saturday, December 13, 2025, in New York City, United States.
Selcuk Acar | Anadolu | Getty Images
The president of SantaCon was arrested on Wednesday on a federal criminal indictment accusing him of using the ticketed Christmas bar-crawl event to divert hundreds of thousands of dollars earmarked for charity to personal use, federal prosecutors in New York said.
The defendant, Stefan Pildes, spent “SantaCon proceeds on extensive renovations to a lakefront property in New Jersey, concert tickets, luxury vacations, extravagant meals, and a luxury vehicle,” according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York.
Pildes, 50, “promoted SantaCon as an event grounded in charitable giving, but instead of donating the millions of dollars he raised, he ran his own con game,” U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton said in a statement.
“He took advantage of New Yorkers’ generous holiday spirit to finance his lifestyle through personal expenses, big and small,” Clayton said.
Prosecutors said Pildes raised at least $2.7 million for charity from 2019 through 2024, but diverted more than half of that money “to a slush fund.”
The resident of Hewitt, N.J., is charged with one count of wire fraud. He is expected to appear on Wednesday afternoon in U.S. District Court in Manhattan.
Prosecutors said he “defrauded tens of thousands of individuals and small business owners who participated in” SantaCon, which annually draws about 25,000 people dressed as Santa Claus and other holiday characters to bars and restaurants in New York City.
Pildes served as president of and controlled the nonprofit entity that organizes SantaCon, Participatory Safety, Inc., prosecutors said.
FBI Assistant Director in Charge of the New York Field Office James Barnacle, Jr. said 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,” Barnacle said in a statement.
A lawyer for Pildes did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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