BENTON COUNTY, ARKANSAS, Ark — A Fayetteville man has been arrested after allegedly taking around $150,000 from an Arkansas veterans nonprofit, which he says he did because of a blackmail scheme.
Martin Svoboda II, 72, was arrested on Jan. 2 and is accused of three counts of theft of property.
According to a probable cause affidavit, a theft report was filed to the Rogers Police Department (RPD) on Dec. 12, 2023, by Cindy Ford, the president of nonprofit Arkansas Veterans Village (AVV).
Ford told police that she was contacted by Arvest Bank and notified that one of their accounts had a negative balance of $7,000. She said that there should have been between $63,000 and $64,000 in the account, according to court documents.
The affidavit says Svoboda was identified as the nonprofit's treasurer and had access to all of the organization's accounts. Ford told police that he had been "using the nonprofit's checks and making them out to himself to pay for personal items such as electric bills and other assorted expenses that were not related to the nonprofit."
Ford told police that this had been going on since 2016 and was only recently discovered, court documents said. She reportedly informed Svoboda at some point that he was no longer AVV's treasurer.
The affidavit says that on Dec. 13, detectives went to Svoboda's residence to speak with him. He admitted to taking around $150,000.
Svoboda told police that he had been scammed and his identity was stolen, which led him to allegedly take the money. He said that in October of 2023, scammers blackmailed him into paying them money, via bitcoin, or else they would ruin his life by posting photoshopped nude photos of him, the affidavit said.
Court documents say that Svoboda used AVV funds to comply with the demands, and that he had used $41,000 of his own money to pay back the nonprofit's expenses over time.
After an inventory of items handed over to police, the affidavit says that there were 125 checks made out to Svoboda from an Arkansas Veterans Village Arvest account. The most recent was dated July 16, 2022, with the first of the checks dated September 1, 2015. The total amount of all the checks was $105,935.00.
Court documents said that Svoboda does not have any relevant criminal history, and that when detectives spoke to his wife, she stated she was not aware that he had been taking money from the nonprofit and that he had been diagnosed with dementia around five or six years prior.
Svoboda is currently being held on a $25,000 bond. He has a hearing scheduled for Feb. 12.
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