Brittney Schmidt and Vincent Fina, a Brooklyn couple, are accused of perpetrating a scheme to scam drug money from firefighters and businesses using the fake story of a son with cancer.
Schmidt, 30, and Fina, 29, were charged with additional counts of scheming to defraud and endangering the welfare of a child on Monday in Lynbrook, New York.
According to Diane Peress, the bureau chief of the Nassau County Economic Crimes Bureau, the two were initially arrested and charged earlier this month but were re-arrested as further details of the alleged scam emerged.
The alleged scam lasted over the course of at least eight months.
Via NBC:
Seven more victims have come forward in the two weeks since Vincent Fina and Brittney Schmidt were first arrested on fraud-related and child endangerment charges. There are now 15 people in Queens, Brooklyn, and Nassau County who claim the couple swindled thousands of dollars out of them in the course of eight months, prosecutors say.
The couple was arrested by Lynbrook police as a result of the investigation by the Nassau District Attorney’s office.
“They started out with their 11-year-old son, saying he had leukemia and that he was collecting for a cancer camp,” said Diane Peress, bureau chief of the Nassau County Economic Crimes Bureau. “Then they moved onto the whole Gianni thing, first looking for gifts for him and then the nonexistent funeral for him.”
The pair were collecting money from a Rossville family who started a GoFundMe page to collect money for their son’s medical expenses.
Kelly Incandela, the mother of Gianni Incandela, a five-year-old boy who was diagnosed with a rare brain cancer, claimed a woman has been walking around with her son’s photo attempting to collect money in his name without her permission.
“About a month ago, we started receiving emails from the GoFundMe page saying that someone was collecting money for my son’s funeral expenses,” Incandela said.
The two are out on probatio, and began a court-ordered 28-day drug treatment program on Tuesday, March 21.
[protected-iframe id=”04c868542027f46326a51032af17e437-3508545-91726680″ info=”http://www.nbcnewyork.com/portableplayer/?cmsID=416664523&videoID=ZP4Ui_F2kybi&origin=nbcnewyork.com&sec=news&subsec=local&width=600&height=360″ height=”450″ width=”750″ ]
