Highly sophisticated real estate scam!!! Melissa Taitano contacted me to lease one of my Luxury rental properties. She wrote a check for $16K for the rental and maybe there was some miscommunication about when it was to be deposited and it came back NSF. She immediately wired the funds to cover it and apologized. She asked me if my properties were for sale and I told her yes. She made an offer which was over $16,000, 000. And was accepted. She wrote me a check for $100K to take them off the rental market and cancel future rentals. Oh, she asked me to hold the check till Monday and she would wire the funds. I thought that would be OK since she had just wired the $16K. She signed the sales contracts to purchase the Luxury compound and the bottom line; all 4 $100K checks were returned NSF also. So now I have 5 NSF checks totaling $500K. I stopped taking rentals, I had 5 professional athletes that wanted to rent the properties which represented $120K of income and she told me to not take the rentals, that we would have closed escrow by then. So I passed on the rentals. She had to take a trip to Guam and said she would make good on the checks before she left, but that didn't happen and then her funds were in a private placement trade account and didn't mature until mid August when she would be returning from Guam - just days before we were suppose to close escrow. I spent over $80K preparing the properties and replacing some furniture etc to have everything ready to go for the August 20th closing date. She asked for a 10 day extension. It was given.in the meantime, I moved my family out of the property and have 5 storage units, but I remain on the property for security reasons. Weeks have passed since the 10 days extension always with a very earnest promise to wire money next week on Monday or Tuesday. As of this date, I am out over $300K. No return phone calls. And the broker statements that she provided from Wachovia Securities and JP Morgan/Chase were all forged and fraudulent. We actually verified one and a follow up phone call today says they have no account number like that in their records. Account numbers, names and amounts were pasted onto real statements. So someway, somehow, she is getting major firms to verify funds for a very limited time period maybe a day or week and then they don't even know who I am calling on. I have bank manager's names and signatures on these verification documents. I don't know if the sales contracts allowed her to try and time-share, fractionalize, find a group of investors take deposits from unsuspecting investors, or what?!!!
All I do know at this point is I am out over $300K and she will continue to defraud clients as she obviously has done. And to meet her you would never believe that it was a total con. She is very polished and convincing and ANYONE who would do business with her is a poor unsuspecting individual.
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