BEDFORD-STUYVESANT — A crowdfunding page set up by a Brooklyn woman currently on the lam in a credit-card fraud case claims to raise money for an elderly neighborhood woman that locals have never met after an eviction that apparently never happened.
Fundraiser creator Valeria Sansosa, an artist who goes by half a dozen different aliases, started raising money in July for a woman she identified as "Ms. Augusta," who had purportedly been evicted from her home on Halsey Street at Tompkins Avenue.
But a review of public records, extensive interviews with neighbors and communication between Sansosa and two fundraising sites raise doubts about the effort.
Sansosa originally set up the fundraiser on GoFundMe around July 21, but the page was taken down for unspecified reasons because it violated the company's terms of agreement, a spokesman said.
A duplicate fundraiser was then set up around July 25 on the smaller crowdfunding site GoGetFunding, again stating that Ms. Augusta had been evicted and was in urgent need of an new place to stay, as well as a storage unit for her belongings. Sansosa wrote that the woman needed a room to stay in because she was bouncing between the homes of neighbors.
The fundraising page, whose deadline to donate to was repeatedly extended, eventually raised its initial goal of $1,800 through mostly small donations of $10, $20 and $50, before the goal was bumped up to $2,000.
After canvassing the block, DNAinfo New York found no neighbors who had ever met or seen the woman identified as Ms. Augusta.
Two dozen residents of Halsey Street between Tompkins and Throop avenues who spoke to DNAinfo — including the owner of a neighborhood restaurant and a clerk at a corner store — said they had never seen Ms. Augusta and did not know to whom the crowdfunding pages might refer.
An extensive search of property sales and real estate records found no trace of the eviction described on the crowdfunding pages and in social media posts by Sansosa.
Sansosa said she had been enlisted by a neighbor of Ms. Augusta to help manage the fundraising effort, and she claimed to have spent long hours with the evicted woman in housing court in late July to help her with her case. After a combative response to a request for more information about the eviction, Sansosa did not respond to repeated inquiries.
Sansosa has a recent history of fraud, according to prosecutors. In March, she pleaded guilty to petit larceny after initially being charged with grand larceny for stealing credit cards from a Manhattan gym locker and using them to make purchases at a store on Park Avenue, court documents show. A judge issued a bench warrant for her arrest on Aug. 11 after she skipped a sentencing hearing, prosecutors said.
Sansosa originally created the GoFundMe campaign under the name Mahlot Sansosa, which she uses publicly in her work as a visual artist. But within days, the site had taken the page down, citing unspecified violations of the site's terms of service, GoFundMe spokesman Bartlett Jackson said.
By that time, Sansosa, using the name “Val,” had already posted a link to the GoFundMe page to the hyperlocal social-networking app Nextdoor. When people asked her why the page had disappeared, she told them Ms. Augusta had accidentally deactivated it and that Sansosa was trying to start a new one.
In the meantime, Sansosa encouraged people to send donations directly to her personal PayPal account.
Several days later, Sansosa recreated the fundraiser on GoGetFunding — a significantly less well-known platform than GoFundMe that takes a 4 percent cut of all donations, 1 percent less than GoFundMe — and posted it to a popular Bed-Stuy Facebook page.
Sansosa’s description on the fundraising page, as well as her posts on Nextdoor and Facebook, claimed Ms. Augusta had owned her building up until several years ago but had since been living there as a tenant.
However, no public records exist to support those claims. There is no property on Halsey Street between Tompkins and Throop avenues that has ever been owned on paper by anyone with the name Augusta, and there have been no evictions on that block at all this year, let alone in July.
Of the handful of evictions on nearby blocks along Halsey Street, Tompkins Avenue and Throop Avenue, none involved a tenant named Augusta.
Sansosa declined to put DNAinfo in contact with Ms. Augusta and intervened when a reporter contacted others who had shared the fundraising page on Facebook, insisting the reporter drop the issue.
Then, on or about Aug. 7, Sansosa disappeared from the campaign completely. Ownership of the GoGetFunding page switched to a woman named Roslyn Green, who claimed to be Ms. Augusta’s niece visiting from Houston to help with the situation. Any mention of Sansosa disappeared from the page, including from her previous updates, which were subsequently listed as being made by Green. On Aug. 7, Green thanked donors and said she had returned to Houston.
Green did not respond to requests for comment through the GoGetFunding messaging app until a reporter emailed Sansosa seeking comment about the discrepancies in her statements regarding the fundraiser.
Within hours of an email being sent to Sansosa, a person identifying themselves as Green reached out from a Gmail account to say that issues with Ms. Augusta were still being worked out.
“There seems to be a mixed bag of perspective on reporting and documentation within this community,” the email stated. “As it stands, power of atterney [sic] will establish with whom further communication will be fit, and when, in regards.”
In response to questions about the apparent discrepancies in the fundraiser and lack of public records about the supposed eviction, the person identifying themselves as Green declined to provide proof of the eviction or to provide contact info for any of the neighbors purportedly working with Ms. Augusta to find housing. About a week after first being contacted, the person offered to reach out to someone who could comment, but failed to respond to further emails.
GoGetFunding pokeswoman Amanda Bizzinotto said the company is reviewing documents provided by the funding organizers.
"If the documentation provided by them is deemed insufficient the campaign will be stopped and we will take the adequate measures to alert donors. If it is sufficient, the campaign will be allowed to continue," she said.
As of Aug. 22, the page — which hit its fundraising goal this week — was still live but no longer accepting donations.
