I was contacted by phone from a company called NationalFunding Center for a private grant thats awarded from many Grant MakingOrganizations (GMO's) aug 15 I was contacted by a Donald Burgin we talkedfor a while about me being qualified before they would even consider me as aclient, that they don't take any clients that are applying for grants under$100,000 Mr Burgen and I talked about the cost of the service he told me $5000is a retainer for writing the grant. I asked him how does your company get paidhe told me the 5000 pays for all the time it takes to write a package, and theyget a referral fee for the grants that are awarded. I expressed to him that$5000 is all I have and to be honest it was in a roth IRA account and back upmoney for my mothers burial shes 86 and ill.
He told me look Vince you have agreat chance of getting this grant for now get this 150,000, he went on to sayare you going to let $5000 get in the way of getting $150,000? I said can Itrust you, he said yes. I has a Travel Agency business at the time but mydream was to open a real estate investment group start up, This has beenplanned out for over 2 years and I had spent over 20,000 in real estateeducation from a company that I intend to do major business with. The Grantwould give me the leverage I needed to get it off the ground. I filled out 2business profiles one for my travel agency and another for the real estatestart up, and decided to go with the Real Estate profile. I had noticed that once my money was cashedand the profiles sent in I was not getting call backs in a timely manner. Firstthey assigned me Vallarie then she went missing out sick or vacation. I didn'tget call backs from her, I then had to keep calling until they assigned Kiyranthen she went missing and then I was assigned to in Nov Ken Larson.
For awhile I thought OK now we can get the ball rolling. To my dismay Ken stoppedcalling also missed phone appointments about the profiles that I sent in. Aftermany more calls to I finally got in touch with Donald again and the excuseswere starting to come, Ken was out sick but will get back to you. Then againcalling them trying to find out what they were doing with my money, Don said hewas going to send me 32 pages of grant making organizations. I received 16paged of hard to read information, Called back again where is the rest of thenand what do I do with all this, he said read it these are who we sent them too, to be honest with you it looked like a list from someone else file. Thenrecently I called them and said I need to talk to someone now of I will seekadvice from an attorney because they were not following the steps that weredescribed on their website. I felt ripped off. I left a message for someone tocall me. I was so pissed at myself for allowing these people to convince me to trust them.
How stupid I was to find out that Victor Cardone the so called one that runs the place was so argent and nasty to me over the for for asking him to provide a run down of what they did for the $5000 I sent to him. The reply I got was hey do you really think someone is going to give you 100k plus without an impact study of setting up a non profit org. What kind of investor are you! This is just half the story. I wont bore you with the fine details but after going through 3 profilers with missed phone appointments I knew something was up. Victor told me we did all we had to do for the money you gave me. I said to him you won't hear the end of this, Ripping off the public is something you will have to not only sleep with but you will have to own up to sooner or later. I can't believe they are not regulated in any way. I own a travel agency and before we could conduct business we had to register with the attorney generals office and also join a restitution fund all agents in California has to pay into if anyone of us defrauded a client besides going to jail. I will talk to my AG here in California this kind of fraud need to stop and they need to get regulated and all conditions of the contract agreement need to be explained in detail along with a 3 day waiting period, meaning the cash should be in a holding account for 3 days before anything can go forward.
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