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!