Adam, Eve and the APPLE of doom

Sometiimes I must make up some stuff to get a nice flashy headline. Well, to be honest, the story I'm about to tell does neither involve Eve nor Adam. It does however involve some innocence being lost.

A few days ago, a good friend of mine was contacted by an "Investment trading firm" calling themselves SMG Capital, a "Tokyo based" telephone trading company. He was offered to buy Apple Inc. shares at an impressively low price. By the way: Does anyone here believe that recommending "Apple Inc." for an investment is a smart, insider kind of hint? Even my grandma knows about Steve Jobs' latest achievements. Still he got a professional looking "research" (HAH!) leaflet describing SMG Capital as well as Apple Inc..

Doesn't all that look good? Very good? Too good perhaps? Let me put this extremely straight: Yes, it does in fact look too good to be true. SGM Capital is nothing but a bunch of fraudsters repeating the same plan over and over again. So far my friends and me have come up with at least these other fraudulent "companies" (neither of which exist).

• Okuma Group
• Dai Ichi Securities
• Sakura Financial Group
• Delta Continental 
• Satori Group

It's exactly the same thing I have already written about regarding  Delta Continental. All of these fake companies share some specific similarities:

• The agents call with no or fake caller ID
• The company has a web site giving very little or no information about the companies legal status (like registration numbers)
• The only internet evidence about the company can be found in dubious "free press" sites like prlog.com, openPR and the like.
• They always start with a renowned paper at an attractive price, faking high gains (of a stock you don't actually own!) within short time.
• Money always has to be transferred via very dubious clearing agents like "Serluna Ltd", "Dragon link Solutions", "Jubilant Holdings" and so on. This is done to keep them from being tracked down following the money trail.
• They then talk you into buying an unknown but even more profitable paper, with a substantial additional payment
• Then this last step is repeated until the "client/victim" runs out of money or patience.

Doing so, the fraudsters can  gain any amount between 5.000 and more than 200.000€ per victim. Please do not give a single cent to these assholes. They are fraudsters!

There is an old saying which about sums all that up: "If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck".

Still in doubt? Do you really think I could write all that without being sued to hell and back if these were real, legally operating companies?

I'm not dead, just busy: Satori Group

Oh, I'm sorry I kept you millions of readers waiting for so long. I was busy. Yes, in fact even I have to do some ordinary work every now and then. But now I'm back with new news - GAAH - the newest news! I have found a new company. Forget Delta Continental, now that Satori Group is here!

No, please do not forget about Delta Continental, they're still dangerous but please do mind the new fraud-star company, the Satori Group!

On the other hand, don't be too excited about it, it's identically the same shit we already know,  the names change, the game stays the same. I got word about this new group from a guy who already dumped Dai Ichi Securities after having lost almost 50000€. Either these guys are absolutely balls-of-steel kind of cool or they are blazingly stupid to once more contact the guy they already stripped down to his undies.

Right now I prefer to believe the latter is the case. For your very reading pleasure, I have also provided the absolutely DIY looking invoice

along with the new banking information (aka money launderer #1):
 

Jubilant Holdings Limited
068-76-000259-7-00
Taishin International Bank (Chien-Kuo N Branch)
2F, NO. 17, Sec. 2, Jianguo North Road,
Taipei 104,
Taiwan, R.O.C.
TSIBTWTP

OK people, simply do not fall for this annoyingly stupid 324th remix of the old fraud scheme. It's no longer fashionable to be that stupid.

As always, feel free to comment.

Pin the donkey's asshole: Fraud at its best

The Google hits referring to my very special friends are increasing again, which makes me believe that the professional business people have ended their well-deserved summer holiday and returned to work.

What I'm gonna do now is hit the bush with the bass fiddle and see if I can stir up some grumpy hornets. Currently I know about four companies utilizing the proven fraud scheme and thus reaping obscene amounts of money.

* Okuma Group
* Dai Ichi Securities
* Sakura Financial Group
* Delta Continental

The evidence gathered by actual victims is overwhelming so that I can say without any doubt that these companies are fraudulent and no one will ever see a mere trace of his money once "invested".

Then there are several "companies" of which I am quite sure that the same butt wipes can be found behind the scene. If any reader has ever earned real money (i.e. money actually transferred to your account) with one of these companies, tell me and I will remove the name from the list. Whoever wants to see the list extended, this can be done as well. Sufficiently suspicious are:

* Ovannis Capital
* Denko Group
* Offshore Resource
* Green Energy Marketing

All of these  "companies"  acquire via cold calls (illegal in most parts of Europe) speaking English. First they offer shares of well known companies at sensational prices (no reason for hope - you can not trade them since you actualy don't even own them), only to transfer this deposit to some papers of fictitious companies, which are controlled by the fraudsters. Such sock puppet companies include:

* Guizhou Mining or
* Paragon GPS

My conclusion is this: Who ever gets called by these guys will do well claiming to be penniless or - even better - using such a botched English to use that the phone gangsters will see no way to communicate their business idea.

Please don't give those butt wipes any money!

I am of course always available for comments or questions. If you like to post a comment, I would appreciate some information about where you're from (country would be enough).

Delta Continental is busy acquiring

The more I find out, the more I'm sure it's the same guys that recently brought us Sakura, Dai-Ichi and Okuma. This brings me to some theories about the way these comrades do their business. If you dropped in right here, please don't miss my brilliant first part.

The fraud business works in overlapping seasons of six months. The freshly "founded" enterprises set out for acquisition of new victims which are baited by the usual regular stock deals and then gradually prepared for the real ripoff. This can take some months.

While the remaining victims are squeezed out until even the toughest optimists kiss their money goodbye, the next acquisition wave is launched.

This is what currently happens with our well known Sakura, Dai-Ichi and Okuma providers, They have "founded" (or rather: "invented") some new companies (presumably three as well) and are now fishing for fresh idiots.

As of today, I have positive proof of one new fraudulent enterprise - the already known Delta Continental. There must be at least one more I don't yet know of.

What I do already know, is the next step that takes place if one victim is willing to accept the bargain offered. If one really wants to "buy" (we know, noone will ever actually own anything) Amylin Pharmaceuticals shares, he (or she) will be provided with an even more professional-looking commercial invoice along with Bank and wire instructions.

Guess what? The transfer agent looks familiar!

Account Name:   DRAGON LINK SOLUTIONS LTD.
Account Number: 140-07-526855-01
IBAN:           CY11 0050 0140 0001 4007 5268 5501
Swift Code:     HEBACY2NLAR
Bank Name:      Hellenic Bank Ltd.
Address:        International Business Centre
                173, Athalassa Avenue
                Po Box 24529
                2025 Nicosia
                Cyprus

Well, compare that to the transfer agent used for Sakura or Okuma:

Account Name      Serluna Limited
Account Number    140-01-524489-01
SWIFT             HEBACY2N
IBAN              CY12 0050 0140 0001 4001 5244 8901
Bank              Hellenic Bank Ltd
                  International Business Centre
                  173 Athalassa Avenue
                  2025 Nicosia
                  Cyprus

To me, this does not leave too much space for interpretation. Once again, whoever has been contacted by "Delta Continental" or whatever the other companies may be called, please contact me, either via Comment or email.

So let the game commence!

Update: The story continues here!

Delta Continental - A new Fraud-Star is born!

Perhaps you wonder why I was quiet for such a long time? Well, er, let's put it that way: There are certain kinds of sport which are preferably for young people...

At least blogging is suitable for elderly people and now that i have reclaimed my hands, I can devote the very post post to a completely new and fresh fraudster business.

The other day I got another anonymous cold call, this time claiming to originate from a company named Delta Continental. No, these two airlines have not yet merged, Delta Continental claims to be "pure play brokerage and investment management firm devoted to bringing our clients pioneering financial solutions." (*yawn*). I think I remember when I smelled that one before...

A quick google will shed some light:

http://www.google.com/search?q=deltacontinental+press

Yesss! It's the same useless free-press-shit we already found connected to the old farts at Okuma Group, Dai-Ichi Securities and Sakura Financial Group. Some things are different though.

Firstly, the domain is old! It has been created 2005-05-16 and there's real people's names in the contact section! It looks like they have repeated their Paragon-GPS stunt and acquired an existing domain to appear even more inconspicuous. Yet, there is no site to be found in the waybackmachine.

All the rest of this fraudulent business has not changed a bit. They offer Amylin Pharmaceuticals (this company of course does exist)  shares at an amazingly low price but the payment has to be done through an offshore clearing agent, blabla, bullshit! We heard that all before.

Whoever googled for delta continental and found this, please do yourself and me two favors:

1. Do not sent any money to these buttwipes. You will never never never see that again.
2. Drop me a note if you have been contacted. You can do that by either commenting on this post or sending me an email (look at my profile, use a fake account, I don't care).

I'll keep you updated (unless I break my hands again, that is).

Update: The update  is here! If you post a Comment, I would greatly appreciate if you could give me a rough estimation where you're from (Country would do).

I'm more or less keeping my word

Yesterday I promised to reveal some details from yesterday's almost one hour phone call. And yes - I will do so. But with a big but (yes! pun intended! I always wanted to write that)! The single sentence conclusion is:

"The Okuma Group is one of many makeup firms by a highly sophisticated and profitable gang of fraudsters."

I spent a lot of last night's sleep pondering the new information, the result of my own investigations and the possible implications. My contact warned me insistently about getting into the fraudster's way, as he himself received several threatening messages. One of those is still available in his blog (just in case: forget the german text, the message is English anyway).

So if I publish his findings along with mine and get into the "Okuma Group's" way, I might get both of us in trouble.

Up to now, there is no real risk as by some strange twist of fate, google does not index my blog (is the automatic crap detector so powerful already?).

First things first, I will publish what everyone can find out and prove by him (or her)self.

The "Okuma Group" does not exist. Their website (→whois) is hosted on a shared server at Go Daddy and the domains used are registered by an anonymizing proxy service. No serious enterprise would do either of that. Furthermore there is not a single word about the corporate organization on the entire website. This is not only unusual, in fact it is illegal for a Japanese company to omit this information.

Feel free to check all of that by yourself and then decide if you would like to do business with a non-existing company. I know, I don't and that's exactly what I'm gonna tell them, the next time they call me.

Benchmarking the blogger war!

I still have major problems getting my blog googled although - and that's really weird - blogspot.com is, of course, an integral part of the ever growing Googleverse.

So just out of curiosity and frustration, I signed up for a wordpress.com blog as well. The new blog can be found at http://hubertscumberdale.wordpress.com/. I'll be posting in parallel until I see one platform perform clearly superior.

That's gonna be a whole bag of fun !?!

And they really called!

In my last post I mentioned a lengthy chat I had with a pretty nice guy from one of the world's leading "investment management firms", the well known "Okuma Group". Roughly 45 seconds past the time scheduled, he called (anonymously again) and offered me a premium investment opportunity.

I am a suspicious bastard, so I asked him about his number not being displayed on my phone and he explained to me that he was calling from Japan and the Japs were continuously having problems getting that right. I think, I've heard that somewhere before.

The deal itself sounded pretty hot. Of course I checked the company described in the profile I received yesterday. The company checked out rock solid and the quote was already rising fast. But that was not a major problem to me because the Okuma Group have excellent connections and were able to acquire a substantial amount of shares at an amazingly low price. Some of these shares were still available for purchase, so I did not think twice.

I checked my petty cash and signed in for xxx shares. After some serious ID confirmation business on the phone, they promised to provide me with the necessary documents within the next few hours. They kept their word.

I am now holding the necessary documents in my very hands. Well, not quite. It's all pdf, I guess, so I'd have to print that to really hold it in my hands.

Boring? Sounds like real business. So why do I write about that? Well....there was.....one thing that made me wonder.

The last Email contained a "money transfer form" which finally managed to blow all my alarm whistles. I should direct my payment (of some thousand Euros) to a clearing agent in Cyprus. That's the document (click for king size view):

OMG. Hear the alarm bell ringing? Needless to say that I could not find any evidence about the mere existence of this alleged clearing agency. So I dug in deeper and I found something.

I found the very same document I had, available for download in a german blog. Well my German is about as good as my Italian (ciao, pronto, amore, scopare), but Google translator gave me an overview. From what I understood, the guy (or Girl? *sigh*) had done quite some investigation before she (or he) was urged (supposedly by "Okuma Group") to take down the posts.

That was the point where I decided to contact her (or him?) to find the background story. I was lucky. Just two hours later I got a reply where he (*argh*) told me - first of all - to edit some details out of my two posts which could reveal my identity. He also offered me to have a talk on the phone as long as I called him with proper caller ID. Tomorrow I'll tell you about our phone call...

How's that for a start?

Kewl. Sometimes it seems to pay off being gullible and industrious at the same time. Just a few minutes before my lunch break would have split another boring day of unsexy IT stuff, I got an anonymous call.

Yes, I am obliged to answer anonymous calls, it has been more than once that an angry road warrior called from hell knows where just to inform me "My VPN ain't workin' - fix that, dumbass! Pronto!" You know, that's the times when you love your job the most!

Today it was different. I got a call by a nice guy who was ever so polite and caring, I simply couldn't resist listening to his generous offer. Guess what? He wanted to help me make buckets of money without any physical work being involved. That sounded exactly like a deal for me.

He promised to provide me with information to prove the deal was real and really lucrative. So he did. He sent me two beautifully crafted pdf files, one introducing the "Okuma Group", a team of "skilled, talented and qualified professionals who
all hail from major investment management firms" on one hand and the share they wanted to offer me on the other.

Some cursory googling raised no serious suspicions, so I promised to take a look at the docs and await their call tomorrow.

Money, money, money - here I come!

Wow! That's so two dot zero!

Maybe I shouldn't have signed in to that crap site in the first place. OK, too late now. As of today, I got another breakthrough offer from my friends at bloggingtothebank.com.

It's not only blogging. We all know that blogging is for elderly people. Us young folks are much more into the flashy stuff like Farmville Twitter!

Obviously there is a solution for that as well:

"Hi Hubert,

You need to check out this video...

http://www.bloggingtothebank.com/tweetomaticprofiteer/

I know you’re busy and you don’t want to waste
time on fruitless SEO methods. I’m damn sure you
don’t want to burn a hole in your pocket with
frustrating Adword campaigns.

What you need is a simple but powerful tool that
takes the time and costs out of online profiteering.
Mike Wright and Imran S have found a way to combine
the strengths of Twitter with the opportunities
presented by Clickbank."

and so on.

Makes me wonder if they would also do all my tweeting for me (just the same way they offered me to generate the content for my blog)?

At least there is not much work involved

Although I did not pay the fee requested, I still got a mail explaining the details about my new money generating blog. I didn't even dream about it being that easy:

Hi Hubert,

Congratulations... You've Got A Free Blog

Now if you'd like me and my team to take
care of all the set-up including buying
the domain, providing web hosting and even
writing regular content then click below
right now:

http://www.bloggingtothebank.com/setup.html

You can be up and making profit within the
next 24 to 48 hours.

Wah! "and even writing regular content" Isn't that gorgeous? I don't even have to care about "Content". My blog will automatically take care of that as well.

A great idea, that is. There must be millions of bloggers who do not give a fart about their post's content. Just like me. Maybe I should start making money right away!

A good start: I'm an idiot anyway

A few days ago, I found this interesting email in my inbox:

Dear Friend
Are you ready for a change?
A new strategy for making money online... Something none of the 'Guru's' are teaching... or even know about themselves.
Are you sick of banging your head against a brick wall trying the same OLD techniques that just aren't producing results anymore.

The mail finally directs me to: http://www.bloggingtothebank.com/, a site promising me several hundred dollars per day by simply blogging.  Why the hell did I sign up for blogspot.com then? WTF?

As you already know, I'm an idiot, so I signed in for one of the few money making blogs left and - guess what?

Click Below To Get Your Own Automated Money Making Blog For Just $24.95 And Be Up And Making Money Today...

Aaargh. I'm afraid, I don't have a credit card number handy right now. So still no fortune earned by my blogging.