Man raised nearly half-a-million for Black Lives Matter but spent the money on himself

He called himself Sir Maejor Page but his real name was Tyree Conyers-Page. He started to make a name for himself as an Atlanta-area activists in 2015 and founded an organization called Black Lives Matter of Greater Atlanta. For most of the past several years his efforts to promote the organization weren’t terribly successful, but that all changed after the killing of George Floyd and the police shooting of Rayshard Brooks. This summer BLM of Greater Atlanta benefited from a huge influx of donations totaling nearly half-a-million dollars.

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Page ran a Facebook page called Black Lives Matter of Greater Atlanta and solicited money through a GoFundMe account, the FBI said in a news release.

Between April 2018 and May 2020, the the group’s balance never exceeded $5,000, but donations started pouring in earlier this year after George Floyd’s death at the hands of Minneapolis police, officials said. Black Lives Matter of Greater Atlanta raised nearly $470,000 between June and August, and the funds were transferred to an account that was owned and operated by Page.

What Page apparently didn’t know is that someone had tipped of the FBI about him more than a year before. That same person then went back to the FBI once the money started pouring in this summer:

According to the complaint, back in April 2019, a witness tipped off the FBI that Conyers-Page may have been using the Black Lives Matter of Greater Atlanta (BLMGA) non-profit organization to make money.

More than a year later in June 2020, that same witness went back to the FBI showing that the BLMGA organization Conyers-Page founded – a splinter group that was never recognized as a representative of the official Atlanta Black Lives Matter organization – was receiving donations from it’s official Facebook page. The page, which was registered with the social media company as a non-profit, was cleared to receive donations because of that, even though Conyers-Page’s organization had lost its tax-exempt status in 2019.

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While all of this was happening, Page was boasting about his newfound success on livestream videos. According to the complaint he had no job and no other source of income. An ATM card linked to his BLM organization’s bank account is what he used to pay for things:

Numerous videos and livestream videos were posted to Page’s personal social media pages showing himself in what appeared to be newly purchased clothing, hotel rooms, and office space in Atlanta. Several audio statements are made by Page in the videos boasting about the money he has, his tailored suits, his nice cufflinks and “$150 dollar ties,” and boasting about “my room way up at the top…at the top top…they put the bottom feeders on these floors….”

In summary, Page has spent over $200,000 on personal items generated from donations received from the BLMGA social media page with no identifiable purchase or expenditure for social or racial justice.

According to the complaint, none of the money Page’s group raised was spent on any social justice cause. The big-ticket item from Page’s $200,000 spending spree was a house which he bought in Toledo. A friend claimed that Page had bought the house on behalf of another group he was part of and intended to make it into a shelter for victims of domestic abuse. But he was apparently living there at least some of the time.

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Last Friday, Page was arrested by the FBI at the house and then FBI agents were seen pulling boxes of items and a flat screen TV out of the house. Here’s a local news report showing video of the raid. Below that is one of the videos Page uploaded to his YouTube channel in 2018.

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