A 23-year-old man from Tennessee has been charged by prosecutors for pretending to be an attorney and stealing thousands of dollars from people he tricked into being his clients.

The man, John Lambert, was also the co-founder of Students for Trump, a group that campaigned for Trump on college campuses during the 2016 election. According to The Outline, the group is still active and plans to stump for Trump in 2020.

Lambert was charged by New York prosecutors for wire fraud after being arrested last week. He used the online persona “Eric Pope” to solicit lawyerly work from unsuspecting potential clients.

From The Outline:

Since his arrest, more details about Lambert’s background have emerged. Before he allegedly posed as a lawyer, Lambert was in college when he co-founded Students for Trump. As the group’s vice chairman, he appeared on NBC and Fox News and shared a stage with the hard-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos. A spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office confirmed that a photo of Lambert depicted the man who was charged.

Lambert co-founded Students for Trump in 2015 at North Carolina’s Campbell University.

The group is still active on social media with 272,000 followers on Instagram and 124,000 Twitter followers. On Facebook, the group has just over 60,000 fans.

A glance down the timelines of the group’s social media accounts shows no mention of Lambert’s arrest and subsequent charges.

As The Outline points out, in 2017 Lambert posted on Facebook that he was taking a break from politics to pursue other business ventures. It was the following summer and fall that his alleged criminal activity took place. According to prosecutors, his scheme was up and running from August 2016 to April 2018.

Prosecutors say Lambert had a co-conspirator who was also masquerading as a lawyer. The unnamed co-conspirator has reportedly been cooperating with prosecutors since April of last year.

H/T Boing Boing