Man Who Claimed BLM Supporters Burned His Truck & Trump Flag Charged With Staging The Attack
It wasn't about politics after all.
Denis Molla / Facebook Back in September 2020, a man living near Minneapolis, Minnesota opened up to news outlets about an alleged attack on his home which he implied was politically-motivated.
The man claimed he woke up just after 3 a.m. on a Wednesday morning to his garage, trucks, and trailer on fire.
The Brooklyn Center family said that they believed it was because of the “Trump 2020” flags that were draped over the property, but this was far from the truth.
The man is now accused of staging the attack he claimed anti-Trump supporters committed.
The U.S. Attorney's Office says that Denis Vladmirovich Molla has been indicted for wire fraud after filing fraudulent insurance claims for a staged arson.
The 29-year-old claimed in 2020 that he woke up in the middle of the night to his property on fire.
"I heard just a big, loud boom, or a bang," Molla told WCCO in September 2020. "The first thing for me was my kids, my wife. What's going on?"
Molla claimed that he saw three people running away from his home after burning it and leaving graffiti on his garage that read "Biden 2020," "BLM" (short for “Black Lives Matter”), and the anarchy symbol of an "A" with a circle around it.
“One of the family's surveillance cameras was blocked just before the explosion,” WCCO reported. “Other surveillance cameras have been turned over to authorities.”
The FBI and the ATF (the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives) were called in to investigate the suspicious circumstance.
“According to court documents, on September 23, 2020, Denis Vladmirovich Molla, 29, falsely reported to law enforcement that someone had lit his camper on fire,” reads the statement from the U.S. Attorney’s Office.
After the fire occurred, Molla tried to cash out on some insurance claims, asking for $300,000 but only receiving $61,000 in return.
“When Molla’s insurance company denied some of those claims,” the report states, “Molla submitted written complaints to the insurance company claiming that it was defrauding him and threatened to report the company to the Department of Commerce and to the Attorney General.”
Molla also created (and allowed others to create) two separate GoFundMe pages to raise money for the property he claimed was burned by Joe Biden supporters.
The money he received from individual donors was $17,000, totaling $78,000 from both the fraudulent insurance claims and the GoFundMe pages.
"Our family's safe, that's the main thing. All this is material, it's all material. It's not as important as our family," Denis said, after the fire had occurred. “These kind of stuff should not happen, especially over beliefs of some sort."
After the conclusion of the FBI’s investigation alongside Brooklyn Center Police Department, charged Molla with two counts of wire fraud for the claims he made with his insurance company after committing arson to his own property.
Molla made his initial appearance in the U.S. District Court on Tuesday, July 12th.
Isaac Serna-Diez is an Assistant Editor who focuses on entertainment and news, social justice, and politics. Since graduating from Rutgers University, he spends most of his free time gaming or playing a fictional sport. Keep up with his rants about current events on his Twitter.