Before sentencing him to 13 months in prison for pretending to be a lawyer, a judged slammed Students for Trump founder John Lambert as a “cold blooded fraudster” who “cared not a whit about the victims of his fraud,” the New York Daily News reports.
As the Daily News points out, Lambert, 25, pretended to be Eric Pope of the Manhattan-based firm Pope & Dunn and falsely claimed to be a graduate of NYU Law School with a finance degree from University of Pennsylvania and 15 years of experience in corporate and patent law.
Victims of his scheme hired Lambert for his legal advice, garnering him over $46,000 of his victims’ money.
“Mr. Lambert took his money and did nothing,” Judge Valerie E. Caproni said. “Mr. Lambert did not even have the common decency to make up an excuse and tell the victim to hire another attorney.”
The scheme ran from 2016 to 2018 while Lambert was an undergraduate student based in North Carolina.
“Prosecutors said Lambert’s plans involved establishing a web of fake websites, lawyer profiles, and phone numbers to craft the Eric Pope persona,” Yahoo! News reports. “He fooled several people and companies, purporting to help on mundane matters like fixing errors in credit reports and consulting on employee relations, according to prosecutors, while taking their money.”
