An influencer, who recruited his customers on Snapchat, was sentenced to seven years in prison and €80,000 fine for embezzling public money during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Paul Antony, known under the pseudonym PA7 on social networks where he now has tens of thousands of subscribers, certainly believed he had flair during the Covid-19 pandemic. Two years later, the 24-year-old was caught by the courts and sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment and a fine of €80,000. He is accused of having misappropriated the aid granted to companies to deal with the health crisis. On Wednesday, July 6, he was found guilty of fraud and organized money laundering.
Paul Antony admitted to having organized, from March 2020, a scam to the solidarity fund. An idea that would have come to him when his activity as a delivery driver was idling at the time of the first confinement, and that his own declaration of aid, falsified, had allowed him to collect more money than expected. He then decided to recruit auto-entrepreneurs or freelancers through publications on Snapchat, and to help them fill out false declarations. Once the money was collected by its customers, the influencer took a 40% commission on the sums recovered.
About 3 million euros in commission
To manage these forms, PA7 would have used the service of six people responsible for filling out the files in offices in Asnières-sur-Seine, the court said. Justice thus linked him to some 700 requests for fraudulent aid, representing 33.8 million euros claimed, including 7.5 million actually paid by the public authorities between March 2020 and July 2021, and nearly 3 million euros of “commission”.
“The disturbance to public, economic and social order is extremely serious with regard to this opportunistic delinquency (consisting) of looting public funds for pure profit motive”said the president of the court about the young man arrested in July 2021 in Dubai. “The pain seems extremely harsh to me”for his part reacted the lawyer of PA7, Maître Mourad Battikh.
A relative of PA7, identified as his right-hand man, was also sentenced to five years’ imprisonment and a fine of €80,000. Four other people were given sentences of two to four years in prison, as well as fines once again reaching €80,000, but three of them are still wanted. A client of the influencer has also received a six-month suspended prison sentence, while other proceedings are still in progress.