The Bryan Ellis Investing Letter – 16 Detroit telemarketers are on the run after being charged with operating a fraudulent telemarketing scheme that sold Detroit properties to nearly 300 victims in 46 states and Canada for as much as 30 times their actual value.
The scammers worked out of call centers in Florida and New York, making unsolicited calls to investors across the country. During the calls, the investors were led to believe that they were being approached to participate in an established process for buying, marketing, and flipping homes in the Detroit area. The properties were represented as previously having mortgages far in excess of the sales price. In reality, the telemarketers were selling properties that had been acquired quickly for about $500 or less for between $7,500 and $15,000. The investors believed that they were purchasing properties that would soon be flipped to a hedge fund for “substantial profit,” but in reality the properties were simply transferred to a shell company controlled by the telemarketers for no profit at all.
Once an investor had successfully completed one of these transactions, they frequently opted to do more. However, the more homes that investors purchased, the more difficult it became to contact the telemarketing company, which used a number of aliases and changed company names regularly.
In all, 16 individuals have been charged and a number of those individuals were arrested last week after some fled overseas using fraudulent passports. The FBI was able to locate Gregory Swarn, a scammer based in New York who had escaped the U.S. and was living in Thailand and who also went by the name Kwame Rasheed Jackson[1], in early November. Erez Arsoni, another New York resident, is still on the Diplomatic Security Service (DSS)’s most-wanted list and a fugitive abroad. During the course of the investigation, the FBI seized more than $1 million in proceeds[2].
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Original article published by Carole VanSickle Ellis on the The Bryan Ellis Investing Letter.
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