RÉSUMÉ OF A CONVICT: The Dante Richardson Story

Fake degrees. An alleged barroom showdown over another man’s girlfriend. Bullets on the I-190. And a mysterious “HopeFundMe” fundraiser that vanished.

By: Staff Reports

     For those of you picking up this newspaper who have never heard the name Dante Richardson before, congratulations—you’ve lived a peaceful life up until now.

     Allow us to introduce him.

     Depending on which version of Dante Richardson you happen to be listening to, he is either a Stanford-educated tech entrepreneur, a blockchain strategist, a fearless political reformer, a victim of a targeted highway assassination attempt, or a man spared by Jesus Christ himself so he can continue his mission of fighting corruption.

     That’s the Dante Richardson story. The problem is that almost none of it is true.

     Strip away the LinkedIn mythology, the donation pages, and the dramatic social-media testimony, and what you’re left with is something far less inspiring: a violent felon with a talent for inventing résumés, intimidating people who call him out, and somehow turning every new problem he creates into someone else’s conspiracy.

     And like most bad stories, this one begins with a résumé.

     On December 5th, 2025, Buffalo Biodiesel Inc. hired Richardson after he presented himself as a highly educated business professional with elite credentials and an impressive career in finance and technology.

     According to Richardson, he had a bachelor’s degree from the University of Rochester and an MBA from Stanford University.

     According to the National Student Clearinghouse, he had neither.

     His work history was even more impressive.

     If you believed Richardson’s résumé, he had already begun building a corporate career before most teenagers are allowed to stay out past 10pm. He claimed to have worked as an apprentice at age 13, an office manager running payroll at age 14, and a bank intern at age 15.

     In other words, by Richardson’s account, Western New York employers were apparently

handing serious corporate responsibilities to middle school students. But that still wasn’t the biggest problem with Richardson’s résumé.

     Because while he claimed to be holding professional jobs across New York City, Silicon Valley, and the tech sector for years at a time he was actually in state prison.

     Richardson spent nearly a decade incarcerated after being convicted of a violent home invasion in Buffalo in which he and an accomplice entered a residence wearing masks and carrying a loaded handgun.

     So the timeline gets a little tricky. Somehow, while serving time for armed burglary and robbery, Richardson also managed – at least according to his résumé – to maintain a flourishing career in finance, technology, and corporate consulting.

     That’s quite a commute.

     It took Buffalo Biodiesel about a month to figure out several parts of his story didn’t add up. On January 10th, 2026, Richardson was fired.  And that’s when things went from résumé fraud to something much stranger.

     After his termination, Richardson allegedly began sending threatening messages to the company’s owner. Images with countdown clocks. Messages implying that “time was up.” Communications that appeared less like a professional dispute and more like intimidation.

Richardson's employment application where he wrote he graduated from Stanford (although he actually spelled it "Standford")

     Then, less than 36 hours later, Richardson found himself at a bar in Buffalo. Shortly after that, gunfire erupted on the I-190. Richardson says he was the victim of a targeted shooting.

     Police appear to have a very different understanding of what happened. But before investigators could even finish piecing together the events of that night, Richardson had already begun telling the world his version of the story.

     Soon, donation campaigns appeared online describing him as a man who had been shot three times and miraculously spared by divine intervention.

     One of those campaigns appeared on GoFundMe.

     The other appeared on something called “HopeFundMe.”

     Which sounds legitimate until you realize that “HopeFundMe” isn’t a fundraising platform.

     It was a website Richardson or someone on his behalf appeared to have created.

     By the time it disappeared, more than $6,000 had already been collected.

     So before we get to the bar fight, the thruway shooting, the police investigation, the donation campaigns, and the increasingly strange public statements that followed, we need to start with the part of the story that set everything else in motion.

     The résumé.

     Because once you start pulling on that thread, the entire Dante Richardson story begins to unravel.

Then Came the Shooting

     If the Dante Richardson story had ended with a résumé that collapsed faster than a folding table at a Bills tailgate it would have been amusing. Instead, it got violent.

     Less than 36 hours after being fired from Buffalo Biodiesel, Richardson found himself at the center of a late-night shooting that ended with gunfire on the I-190. And almost immediately, Richardson began telling the public who he believed was responsible.

     In statements to an online blog, Richardson alleged that two parties carried out the attack—one of whom he specifically named as Buffalo Biodiesel.

     It was a bold accusation. There’s just one problem. According to New York State Police, the evidence doesn’t support it.

     Investigators say the individuals Richardson publicly blamed are not suspects, not persons of interest, and do not appear on surveillance footage from the bar where the night began. They also do not appear on surveillance footage connected to the shooting itself.

     In other words, the people Richardson accused weren’t even there. But police say someone else was. Investigators have identified the alleged shooter.

They know who he is.

They know where the confrontation began.

They know how it escalated.

And they know why it happened.

     And according to accounts of what unfolded that night, the reason appears to have nothing to do with corporate revenge plots or political enemies.

     Instead, the story allegedly begins inside a downtown Buffalo bar where – according to one source cocaine flows more freely than beer.

     Richardson reportedly walked into the bar that night with one woman. According to a source, he left with two. And somewhere between those two facts, things allegedly went sideways.

     Sources say Richardson got into a confrontation with another man inside the bar after tensions escalated over one of the women present. According to those accounts, Richardson may have tried to out-swagger someone who was not particularly interested in being out-swaggered.

     Or, as one source bluntly put it, he tried to out-gangster the gangster. That rarely ends well.

     According to accounts of the incident, the man Richardson allegedly antagonized that night did not take kindly to the public humiliation of having his girl leave with someone else in a crowded bar.

     And unlike Richardson – who, according to critics, prefers playing the role of street tough online – the man he allegedly crossed may have actually been willing to back it up.

     What happened next is now part of an ongoing investigation. Richardson was shot. Three times, according to his own public statements.

     And within days, Richardson was telling the public a very different story of how powerful enemies had orchestrated an attempt on his life.

     Investigators, however, see something far less dramatic. Because according to law enforcement sources, the shooting appears to have been the result of a confrontation that began inside that bar—not a corporate assassination plot.

     This raises a rather obvious question. If police know who the shooter allegedly is, and if the people Richardson publicly blamed weren’t even present, why was Richardson pointing the finger at them in the first place?

     That question becomes even more interesting when you look at what Richardson did next. While investigators have been trying to determine exactly what happened that night on the thruway, Richardson was busy doing something else.

     He was raising money. Thousands of dollars. From people who believed the story he was telling.

Then Came the Fundraising

     Shortly after the shooting, Dante Richardson was no longer just the alleged victim of a dramatic highway attack. He was also a man asking the public – specifically the faithful, the charitable, and anyone scrolling past his story online – to help him financially.

     And he did it in a way that reads less like a personal appeal and more like something generated by a motivational poster factory.

     The fundraising message Richardson circulated online was a sprawling, sermon-like narrative filled with references to faith, divine intervention, moral courage, and a life supposedly spared by God for a greater purpose.

     According to Richardson’s post, he is not simply a shooting victim. He is a father, a son, a tech entrepreneur, a proud American, and a man who survived a targeted attack thanks to the grace of Jesus Christ.

     Scripture was included. Faith was emphasized. And donations were requested. Lots of them.

     The tone of the message reads less like something written by a man recovering from gunshot wounds and more like a strangely polished block of inspirational internet prose—the kind of language that has become instantly recognizable in the age of AI-generated content.

     Paragraph after paragraph of sweeping declarations:

“Faith over fear.”

“Standing against corruption.”

“Speaking truth comes at a cost.”

“God spared my life for a reason.”

     It reads like a cross between a campaign speech, a sermon, and a LinkedIn motivational post.

     But the real story isn’t just the writing. It’s where the money went.

     Richardson launched two separate fundraising campaigns. One of them was legitimate, at least in the sense that it existed on a real platform. A GoFundMe page that, as of now, has raised $595.

     The other campaign is where things get strange. That second fundraiser appeared on something called HopeFundMe.

     At first glance, the name looks familiar enough to trick a casual reader. It sounds almost identical to GoFundMe, the well-known crowdfunding site people use for legitimate causes every day.

     But there’s a problem, HopeFundMe is not a recognized crowdfunding platform. There is no established fundraising service by that name. No widely used charity site. No platform with a reputation or public history.

     Instead, the website appeared online just long enough to host Richardson’s fundraising appeal, collect money and then quietly disappear.

      According to available records and screenshots of the page, the HopeFundMe campaign reportedly collected more than $6,000 before the site was taken down.

This is what shows when you go to Richardson's HopeFundMe page. Shortly after reaching the $6,000 mark it was taken down.

     Today, the page itself no longer loads because of a host error. But the URL still exists—a digital breadcrumb left behind like the world’s least convincing disappearing act.

     It raises an obvious question, with an even simpler answer, if HopeFundMe was a legitimate fundraising platform why did it vanish the moment money started flowing?

     It was likely created specifically to host the campaign, either by Richardson or someone associated with him, allowing donations to be collected outside the oversight and transparency typically associated with real crowdfunding platforms.

     In other words, a fundraising page that looks legitimate enough to attract donations, but disappears before anyone starts asking questions.

     And if the tone of the message felt carefully tailored to reach a particular audience, that may not have been accidental either.

     Richardson leaned heavily into religious language – purposefully of course – by invoking Jesus, faith, prayer, divine purpose, and moral courage at nearly every turn.

     For readers inclined toward generosity and faith, the message reads like a spiritual testimony from a man saved by God after a near-death experience.

     For critics, it reads like something else entirely.

     A carefully crafted pitch aimed directly at people who are most likely to open their wallets when someone says God spared their life. The name HopeFundMe itself fits neatly into that theme.

Hope.

Faith.

Charity.

     All the right words. Just not attached to a real platform. Add it all together and the fundraising totals begin to paint an interesting picture.

     Roughly $595 raised on GoFundMe. Just over $6,000 raised on the mysterious HopeFundMe site before it disappeared.

     Combined, that puts the total at just under $7,000. Not a life-changing sum of money, but enough to make people start asking questions.

     Especially when the story being told to donors begins to look very different from the one investigators appear to be piecing together.

     And when it comes to Dante Richardson, the one consistent theme in this entire saga is that the public story—and the actual facts—rarely seem to match.

The Violent Felon Part

     By now, the Dante Richardson story probably sounds chaotic.

     Fake résumé. Threats after getting fired. A bar fight that spills onto the thruway. Gunfire on the I-190. A mysterious “HopeFundMe” website collecting thousands of dollars before disappearing.

     But if you’re wondering how someone ends up at the center of this kind of chaos, the answer might lie in something Richardson rarely mentions when he’s presenting himself as a Stanford-educated tech entrepreneur.

     His criminal record.

     Long before the résumé fiction, shooting drama, and fundraising sermons, Dante Richardson was already known to law enforcement in Western New York for something far more serious. A violent home invasion.

     According to an official announcement from the Erie County District Attorney’s Office, Richardson was convicted in 2014 after a jury trial of Burglary in the First Degree, Robbery in the First Degree, and Criminal Possession of a Weapon in the Second Degree.

     The crime dated back to July 2012. The victim was a 48-year-old woman in Buffalo.

     Prosecutors said Richardson and an accomplice forced their way into the woman’s home wearing masks and plastic gloves while carrying a loaded .32-caliber pistol,

     Once inside, they threatened the woman’s life and demanded money. The entire invasion was calculated, violent, and terrifying for the victim. And what did the armed intruders manage to escape with after all that?

     Ten dollars and a bag of condoms. That’s it.

     The pair fled when Buffalo Police arrived, leaving behind a crime scene that prosecutors later described in court.

     Richardson’s defense at trial did not go particularly well. According to the District Attorney’s Office, Richardson claimed he was never inside the victim’s residence at all. Instead, he offered what prosecutors described as an alternative “theory of defense.” He testified that he supposedly had permission to be inside the home from a former tenant and that he was simply there retrieving a friend’s belongings.

     In other words, according to Richardson’s version of events, the armed home invasion was basically just a misunderstanding.

     Prosecutors, the jury, and the judge did not appear convinced. Not even close. The case went to the jury after a week-long trial and the deliberations were about as long as it takes to eat a sandwich.

     The jury took one and a half hours to reach a verdict. That time included lunch.

     The District Attorney’s Office later summarized the outcome in a line that still reads like quiet courtroom sarcasm: The jury “quickly saw through the defendant’s lies.”

     Richardson was convicted on all major counts. The judge later sentenced him to 10 years in state prison.

     He ultimately served roughly eight years behind bars before being released and later finishing parole in 2023.

     Which brings us back to the present.

     Because the man who now describes himself online as a tech entrepreneur, political reformer, and victim of a targeted attack is also, under New York law, a convicted violent felon.

     And once you understand that part of the story, many of the other chapters suddenly start to make a lot more sense.

     The résumé. The threats. The bar confrontation. The mysterious fundraising websites. The dramatic public statements.

     Because when the pattern of someone’s life starts repeating itself, the biggest surprise isn’t what happened. It’s that anyone believed the story in the first place.

The Pattern

     By now, the Dante Richardson story isn’t really about any single event. Not the résumé. Not the firing. Not the bar fight. Not even the shooting on the I-190.

     It’s about the pattern. Start at the beginning and the same themes appear over and over again.

     A story is told. It sounds impressive. It sounds dramatic. Sometimes it even sounds heroic. And then the facts begin to arrive.

     The Stanford MBA doesn’t exist. The University of Rochester degree doesn’t exist. The teenage corporate career apparently never happened.

     The corporate conspiracy behind the highway shooting appears unsupported by the evidence investigators have described. The mysterious fundraising website disappears the moment questions start being asked.

     And buried underneath all of it is the part of the story Richardson rarely emphasizes when he’s introducing himself to the public: He is a convicted violent felon who spent years in state prison for a home invasion involving a loaded firearm and a terrified woman inside her own home.

     None of those facts are a matter of opinion. They’re public record.

     And yet the public narrative Richardson continues to present online looks very different. In that version of the story, he is the victim. The reformer. The man who challenged corruption. The man who survived an assassination attempt. The man spared by God to continue a greater mission.

     But when you step back and line up the timeline –  the employment fraud, the threats after termination, the bar confrontation, the shooting, the fundraising campaigns, and the criminal record – the story begins to look less like a crusade and more like something else entirely.

     Chaos. Self-inflicted chaos.

     And if there is one consistent theme running through the entire Dante Richardson saga, it’s this: Every time something goes wrong, the explanation somehow becomes someone else’s fault.

     The company that fired him. The enemies who allegedly targeted him. The mysterious forces supposedly trying to silence him.

     But eventually, the stories start colliding with reality. Investigators know who was at the bar. They know who was not. They know where the confrontation began. And they know far more about the shooting than the public narrative Richardson has been telling.

     At the same time, questions remain about the money that was raised in the days after the incident. Roughly $7,000 collected across two fundraising campaigns. One hosted on a legitimate platform and the other appearing on a website that vanished almost as quickly as it arrived.

     Whether any of those issues ultimately lead to legal consequences remains to be seen, but the larger picture is already clear.

     Dante Richardson has spent a great deal of time telling people who he is:

A tech entrepreneur.

A reformer.

A victim.

A man of faith.

     But the facts tell a much simpler story.

A résumé that doesn’t exist.

A fundraising website that disappeared.

A criminal conviction for a violent home invasion.

And a shooting that appears to have started not with a corporate conspiracy — but with a confrontation inside a bar.

     Strip away the drama, the social-media sermons, and the motivational speeches about faith and courage, and what’s left is something far less inspiring.

     Just another man who keeps telling stories and hoping people don’t check the facts. But eventually, they always do.

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RÉSUMÉ OF A CONVICT: The Dante Richardson Story