John approached me about him needing "bridge funding" - i.E. He needed to come up with a sizeable deposit for a bank to loan $144 million to mine a mineral (kalen) which would be used to help clean up the BP oil spill. There is a kalen mine in southern utah that the owners were seeking a funding source. Kalen was used in an oil spill off california's coast in the 80's I believe. Apparently kelan absorbs the oil and it falls harmlessly to the sea bottom from what I was told by John.
Many of the family members of this kalen mine gave John hundrends of thousands of dollars that was to be kept in a trust account and could ONLY be removed with our signatures. My friend personally knew one of the family members of this mine and he had personally invested his money and was trying to help John find other people to raise enough money that a bank would give them the loan. I invested $15,000 and a good friend of mine also decided to invest $10,000.
The trust account was managed by an escrow officer named Ted Braybant, a real estate broker in Reno Nevada. Ted was tricked by John into sending the money to another bank account without our signatures. At this point, the money is nowhere to be found. John has a way of giving people hope that they are going to get ten times the money they invested. John is very convincing and many of the investors were in denial that they had lost their money at first. But after almost 1 1/2 years, John has yet to refund a single dime to anyone, despite their begging and pleading to return their life savings. After doing a deeper search on John, it was found that he has done this multiple times in different states. He connects himself with a legitimate organization that is looking for funding, raises funds, and then moves them into his accounts and the money is gone.
This whole thing has been very frustrating as I have contacted law enforcement - local and federal, and it seems they don't have time to look into something like this. We have burgalars who steal a few hundred to a few thousand dollars from people and the police are after them right away. Why is it that the biggest criminals get away with scamming people?
Do NOT trust John Chapman - he is a crook!
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