Sean Kingston arrested for fraud and theft

Kingston, this is Sean.
Photo: Tim Mosenfelder/Getty Images

Sean Kingston was arrested in California on Thursday, May 23, hours after police raided his Florida home the same day, Page Six reports. Police took Kingston, born Kisean Paul Anderson, into custody near Fort Irwin, an Army base 150 miles (240 kilometers) from Los Angeles, before booking him into a jail in San Bernardino, California, according to the Broward County Sheriff’s Office. The “Beautiful Girls” singer already had an arrest warrant out for multiple fraud and theft charges before he was taken into custody. During the Florida raid, police took Kingston’s mother, Janice Turner, into custody on the same charges. “People love negative energy!” Kingston wrote in an Instagram Story after the incident, adding, “My lawyers are handling everything right now 🙏🏽🙏🏽.” Robert Rosenblatt, an attorney for Kingston and his mother, all but denied the allegations. “These are fine people, and I would be surprised if the allegations were true,” he told South Florida Sun Guardian.

The criminal case reportedly stems from a legal dispute with Ver Ver Entertainment, which sued the musician in the late 2000s over the unpaid sale and installation of a 232-inch television valued at about $150,000. He allegedly told the company that he and Justin Bieber would advertise on social media if they lowered the down payment and gave him credit, according to the GuardianA lawyer for the company claimed that Kingston’s business dealings were “a sales pitch designed to defraud people,” Dennis Card said in an interview on May 23. He claimed that the singer persuades people to give him expensive gifts, which amounts to “organized, systematic fraud.”