A former executive at the cinema subscription service MoviePass faces sentencing Thursday for having embezzled at least $260,000 from the company to repay money he borrowed to produce an event at the Coachella music festival in 2018.
Khalid Itum, 45, of Hollywood, was found guilty in February 2024 in Los Angeles federal court of two counts of wire fraud. The jury acquitted Itum of two counts of money laundering, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.
Itum was an executive from November 2017 until March 2019 with MoviePass, a New York-based company that charged subscribers a flat monthly fee in exchange for credits they can spend on movie tickets from any theater in the company’s network of participating cinemas, according to the indictment.
In August 2017, Helios and Matheson Analytics, a New York-based information technology services company, acquired MoviePass.
Months earlier, Itum registered Kaleidoscope Productions, a Los Angeles-based company that provided production and marketing services. The same year, Itum, through Kaleidoscope, organized a party at the annual Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in Indio, prosecutors said.
Neither MoviePass nor Helios participated in the Coachella event. Itum borrowed money from two individuals to help fund Kaleidoscope’s costs, but to repay the borrowed money, he submitted sham invoices to Helios for services purportedly rendered by Kaleidoscope and a different company owned by an Itum associate, prosecutors said.
Itum caused Helios employees to wire money from MoviePass and Helios accounts to a Kaleidoscope bank account to pay the sham invoices. The defendant concealed his scheme by falsely telling Helios’ auditor that Kaleidoscope had been used to pay legitimate MoviePass expenses from the 2018 Coachella festival, evidence shows.
The DOJ said that Itum caused Helios a loss of $260,000.
Former MoviePass chief executives Theodore Farnsworth and J. Mitchell Lowe pleaded guilty in Miami federal court in 2025 and 2024, respectively, for their roles in a scheme to defraud Helios. They are expected to be sentenced later this year.
Helios shuttered MoviePass before filing for bankruptcy in 2020. The subscription service was revived two years later.