A former executive at the once popular and recently revived subscription service MoviePass was charged by federal prosecutors with stealing $260,000 from his company to pay for a party he threw at the 2018 Coachella Music Festival to promote a separate marketing business.
Khalid Itum, 42, a Jordanian citizen, was arrested at his Hollywood home and charged with two counts of wire fraud and two counts of money laundering connected to $260,000 he allegedly embezzled from MoviePass, the New York-based movie ticket subscription company.
Prosecutors say Itum submitted bogus invoices for the party, claiming the event was a way for MoviePass to increase its public profile when he had borrowed the money to throw the party for his own company, Kaleidoscope. At the time, according to the indictment, he was the vice president of business development.
Itum pleaded not guilty Tuesday and was ordered released on a $75,000 bond until his trial, slated to begin on April 18.
MoviePass collapsed in 2019, after losing hundreds of millions of dollars on its supposed all-you-can-watch theatrical subscription model. In November, Itum, along with MoviePass top executives Theodore Farnsworth and Mitch Lowe were indicted on securities fraud charges for allegedly deceiving its investors, along with helping Itum rip off the company by “disguising bonus payments as services purportedly provided by an entity Itum controlled.”
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