I am trying to get this information out to every site I can find. I hope it helps someone avoid what has happened to me and my company.
I am not sure where to start with this scam. First of all, let me be very clear about the company we are talking about. The company goes by a couple of different names - and there are other companies that are similar - but completely legitimate. This company calls itself Captec Software, Inc. Sometimes it will list itself at CaptecSoftware, Inc. Here is the website so there is no confusion. Http://www.captecsoftware.net/. They are located in St. Petersburg Russia.
I was contacted by a representative of that company (Katya Smirnova) through a job board, Employment911.com. They asked me if I would like a position as a Financial Manager with their company. I have seen quite a few of the Nigerian Scams and felt I knew what to look for. As the situation unfolded, they were supposedly looking for partners in the United States to expand their business model. According to their website, specifically the Partnership tab, they were resellers of Website Templates, hosting services, and web development tools. The American partners responsibility was to have a corporation (or to be able to open one), provide a method to accept credit card transactions (including arranging for the proper security procedures - ie a gateway to process the information and check for fraud, and a Merchant Service Provider to credit the funds to the corporate bank account) They provided all of the necessary partnership documents and would create your storefront (a website with the your logo, all the information regarding the program, the actual templates, privacy policy, terms of use, and return policies.) They also were to handle customer and technical support. The American partner was to handle accounting, finance, banking, and logistical arrangements here.
The partnership paperwork calls for an escalating percentage of profits and Captec's percentage (and for those wondering if it was sent by Western Union to some person in Nigeria - that was one of the first things I had targeted on my list.) Proceeds for sales were sent via ACH to a company called Elacont Ventures Corp, which used Duetsche Bank Trust in New York City.
The reason I am giving so much information is I researched this company every way I could. I did corporate research and I literally scoured the web. I still have not found anything outside a half dozen articles linking bank to their website. On that basis I accepted the position and the partnership agreement.
For the first three months, we had daily contact, (via email) and supposedly we were working through some glitches (those would be the chargeback's we were receiving.) They went into great detail to explain their CMS (Customer Management System) and how it tracked everything from the template number ordered - to the IP address it was ordered from. That was up until a little over a month ago, when all of sudden, I heard nothing. This was right after they had told me they had made some adjustments to their CMS system to better prevent unauthorized credit cards from going through the system. (Please keep in mind that we are using a major - third party gateway designed to catch any fraudulent credit cards from being used andor accepted.) It didn't make a bit of difference because VisaMC do not consider a charge that passes through the AVS (Address Verification System) or the CCV number as proof of a valid charge, (even though this is what the gateway's use to determine if the credit card holder is indeed real.)
Long story made short is - this company is going to great lengths to appear legitimate and obviously isn't. I want to get their name - Captec Software - and the name of their holding company - Elacont Ventures Corp - out there in the search engines so no one else will have to face this.
If anyone has any other blogs that they know I can put this out on, or if they know of any agencies that would put this information to good use, please leave it here on the blog. I am going to do everything I can to make sure no one else ends up having to deal with these people. Oh, and one last thing they still have not disconnected the numbers on their phone site, and I have three email addresses just in case anyone else has already run into this problem. They created an email address using my company as the site. It is [email protected]. I have absolutely no access to this email and it was created without my permission.
They also had at least three associates that I was emailing and IM'ing with. The boss was supposed to be a gentleman named Polyakov Alyeksyey. The two associates that I had contact with via email and MSN Messenger were named Katya Smirnova and Sergey Ilchenko. The both used email addresses with the captecsoftware.net ending.
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