Say you’re a notorious House representative booted out of your job on a Friday for a litany of alleged campaign-finance violations and outright lies (as well as for allegedly defrauding a fellow congressman and his mom). Come Monday, with your $174,000 congressional salary a thing of the past, how are you going to pay your mounting legal bills?
George Santos appears to have found a pretty decent solution. On Monday morning, the former lawmaker updated his profile on X with a new message winking at the 23 federal counts he faces. “My community service will be to clean up Congress of it’s corrupt frauds in a Bipartisan way,” he wrote ungrammatically. “My road to redemption will be serving the American people!” More interestingly, Santos added a link to Cameo, the financially struggling service that allows people to request personal recorded messages from athletes, actors, and niche celebrities whose 15 minutes of fame have expired.
Santos first set the price for a video at $75, with a message on the account stating that he would record only 150 messages. But as the requests flooded in, he killed that limit and raised the price to $150. The demand did not waver, and he raised it to $200, and then to $300. As of Wednesday, the price for a roughly 45-second video was $400. If the pace keeps up, he is expected to dwarf his congressional salary in just a few hours of work in total.
Cameo appears to be a perfect way to make a quick buck for Santos, a politician who has relished his notoriety and is clearly not going to shy away from attention. Most of the videos that have been posted online involve friends sending encouraging messages to each other or paying Santos to sing a Taylor Swift hook. Democratic staffers have also been getting in on the action: One video went out to Megan Hunt, the Nebraska state senator who helped lead a filibuster this year to stop the passage of an anti-trans bill. And John Fetterman’s aides pulled a stunt encouraging Santos to send a message to fellow tristate controversy-magnet Bob Menendez:
The good news for customers (and senatorial campaigns) is that it’s basically scamproof; all credit-card information on the site goes through third-party vendors. If you pay George Santos to wish you a happy birthday, it will be unusually hard for him to defraud you — even if you’re still technically getting ripped off for the price.
