My wife and I were looking online to find a loan for people with "less than perfect credit". We filled out several applications and even called some numbers after getting a few responses back.
A few days later, a woman Jennifer Morgan called our home and left a message with our daughter to have us call her back. She said she was with American Beneficial Financial Inc.
To our surprise, after leaving the message with our daughter at home, she called my cell phone.
She told me that she could help us out with a loan for up to $5,000.00. We had only been looking to borrow $2,000 but at the time it sounded like a great deal. She gave me options as to how the program worked. You could get the loan for 2 years or 4 years but you had to put down a certain amount of money first to "secure" this loan. I wrote everything down and told Jennifer I would have to talk it over with my wife.
I got home that evening from work and told my wife about this incredible deal. She wanted to speak to Jennifer to have her go over all the terms and get more information. I tried to call Jennifer but each time I entered her ext I always had to leave a message. She never did speak to my wife because she always returned my calls to my cell phone which came up "restricted" each time.
Two days went by and finally I told my wife that we should do this. The option we took was for a loan for $5,000 with a down payment of $610.30 which would cover the first couple of months payments and then in March 07 we would begin monthly payments of $122.56 with an interest rate of 8%. I contacted Jennifer and told her what we decided to do. She then sent, via email, the loan documents to have me sign. My wife and I went over these documents which had The Great Seal of the State of Michigan and the BBB-Online sign as well.
I printed out these forms, signed, dated and faxed them back to Jennifer. I called her to let her know that I had faxed them and she told me we had to send the down payment of $610.30 by Western Union or Moneygram to a Third Party Lender Edward Bryant, Calgary Enterprise Forum. She stated this is who we would have the loan through. I was so desperate to finally have someone actually give me a chance to help build my credit file back up that I didn't give it a second thought.
Yesterday, Aug 31, my wife went to the bank and took out the money to moneygram to this Edward Bryant. Jennifer told us to call her back with the reference # and we would have our funds automatically deposited into our account in 6-12 hrs. We called her back with the reference # and she said she would contact us if anything went wrong.
Last night my wife was trying to go to sleep and something didn't seem right to her so she jumped on the internet and googled the names of the people and found this website with Mark Marciano's name under Allied Financial Future. She then started checking the Better Business Bureau and found nothing under this company name. The website provided on the documents that were emailed to us does not come up. She called the Moneygram office and was told that our $610.30 was picked up an hour and a half after we sent it yesterday. Unfortunately, there is nothing they can do.
These people now have all of my information including my social security number which I have put a fraud alert on today. They also have my checking account information so we are in the process of closing that account.
Please be wary of looking for loans on the internet. It's a shame that people who work full time but who have had a few stumbles in their lives can't get a loan from a "true" financial company due to credit. That way those of us who have been scammed wouldn't be be typing these comments.
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