Luckily for me this did not get to the stage where I lost money, but there are several reports of these crooks on this website so I wanted to add my experience to back up what the others have already said.
I received an email through a partnering website (it links potential investors with new business owners) from Anglo American Investments stating that they were interested in funding my project, and that I would need to fly out to GA and pay for my own airfare and hotel. There were a couple of things in the form email that indicated that they had not even read my business plan: first, they called me Sir and I am very clearly female (not only do I have a woman's name but in the profile information on the partnering website I indicated my sex). Second, I have great faith in my project but since I am a first-time business owner asking for full start-up capital there is just no way that areputable venture capital firm would be this excited about giving me funding before they've even seen the presentation.
There's also the little matter of the business email being a comcast.net address: why would a multi-billion dollar venture capital firm use an email address that came with their cable, instead of getting a website and sending email through that? Very unprofessional.
I was a little suspicious at this point so I did a search on the information that was listed in the email: scam reports popped up immediately. Apparently that information has also been used to scam people under Letz Finance Groupe, HQ Global Investments, Newbridge Capital Group, and the phone numbers also come up under a bunch of ads asking to buy Himalayan kittens on numerous websites so god only knows what kind of scam is going on there.
There are also multiple names that come up under the search: Anthony Oppenheim aka Anthony Tobin aka Peter White aka Mark Smith.
All of the reports filed on this website under these aliases indicate that they try to scam people by making them pay false due dillagence and inspection fees before they'll finance the project. They can refute all they want, but as the saying goes "Where there's smoke, there's fire"! This many different people making the same complaint can't be a coincidence.
I'm just glad that I did a search on Google so I didn't lose my money, and hope that others do the same in the future so these people will get bored of their game and move on.
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