Victim Location 32003
Type of a scam Advance Fee Loan
We were contacted through Linkedin by Mr. Ahmad Jamir Mustafa, as a financial advisor working for the Swiss Sifem-Ibsa which is the Swiss Investment Fund for Emerging Markets. He asks with interest regarding Hospitality Projects in The Dominican Republic. This Mustafa said he worked directly with Ms. Julia Balandina Jaquier, within Sifem. He offered to help us get through all the steps concerning, the approvals we sent to him all the financial statements of the project. Plus our need for a USD20 million loan, for which he show total agreement. The time to repay would be 10 years with a grace period of 6 months. At this point in time MS Julia wrote to us our documents had to go through a London Lawyer, by the name of Dorothy Pen Chambers. This person rejected our initial petition and asked us for a more detailed information which we supplied. At the end this Dorothy approved the loan. All this process had taken about 8 weeks in phone calls from Mustafa and correspondence with some Sifem board people. During all this time we had checked the Internet and all names were there, plus their email addresses looked legitimate. All persons named and copied in the correspondence coincided perfectly well with the Swiss company name. There were some red lights that started to bother us. Mustafa’s English was quite bad, and the writing from the UK lawyer was really bad. Another factor, in the internet her law firm appeared founded 3 months ago and only one employed. The summon of our mistrust came with an invoice from the said Dorothy for GBP10,450.00 which had to be paid in order for us to receive the loan agreement for signing, plus Barclays Bank allocation of the loan. We totally disagreed to pay a penny until we had all of the official paper in our hands, and charges deducted from the loan, and not paid separately. All the actors involved disappeared and Mr. Mustafa was totally unknown in Switzerland. We did received mails on how could we risk getting USD20 million by not paying the ten thousand sterling. At our refusal we never heard from them again. In certain way we did lose money, in all the time we inves5ted at this matter. But fortunately not a dime was paid foolish.