Texas Border Business
By Samuel David Garcia and Joseph Gallardo
Phishing scams are getting more complex by the day, and this new scam is so sophisticated that it is tricking legitimate business owners. This new scam involves a clone website of a real investment fund, correspondence with a representative that is surprisingly prompt and proper, and a term sheet that is so real it has fooled real attorneys into giving it the green light.
This story all starts with a prominent business owner in South Texas telling a friend of his about a deal he has with an investment firm in Dubai, Al Mojil Holdings International, for $10 million. Because this person’s business is so big and the term sheet sent to the business was approved by an attorney, no alarms went off. Weeks later, this same friend goes to another local business where the owner tells him that he has an investor from Dubai that is going to give him $100 million. When this friend asks him who he is getting the money from, the owner responds, “From this big firm in Dubai, Al Mojil Holdings International, they even gave me this super favorable term sheet!” The friend immediately became suspicious and reached out to us to dig deeper into Al Mojil Holdings International.
We began to look into the history of Al Mojil Holdings International, and what we found was startling. It turns out that the Al Mojil Group is a legitimate and respected investment group in Dubai, and Al Mojil Holdings International is also a legitimate company. However, the website in the letterhead of the emails being sent to both parties was not representing either company, though this was not readily apparent.
The website, AlMojilholdings.com, on its face looks legitimate. But then you start to dig, and little typos here and there and broken hyperlinks tipped us off to a fraudulent operation.
We soon found that the domain name was registered under namecheap.com—not the domain host you would think a billion-dollar fund would use—and was registered in Panama, which we can 100 percent confirm is not in Dubai.
We moved on to searching the names of the “representatives” who emailed both businessmen and discovered that one was listed in a Ripoff Report for, you guessed it, a likely fraudulent offer of financing from Al Mojil Holdings International. After a little more digging we discovered that this was almost certainly not these fraudsters first time doing this. Just a short time before this, a similar scam occurred involving Al Bassam International.
Al Bassam, much like Al Mojil, is a real investment fund, but the website, albassaminvestment.com, was once a detailed front used by the fraudsters. If you happened to try to view albassaminvestment.com now, you may notice that the website is abandoned and that it too is registered under namecheap.com.
According to the account of the friend who reached out to Garcia and a detailed complaint posted in Scam Warners, the fraudsters start off by reaching out to you on LinkedIn and then asking for a company presentation. After limited “due diligence” they present you with a favorable term sheet. Quickly after that they ask you to pay them a “brokerage fee” in order to receive the funds, which we can only assume is the big payoff they are hoping for.
It appears that these fraudsters had their techniques down, and this meant they probably carryover significant amounts of information from scam to scam. So we decided to enter in the first line of the “Chairman’s Message” from the Al Mojil Holdings International fake site into the search bar and discovered that it was the same line used in a similar internet scam involving Massar Investments, which also happens to be a real investment firm in Dubai.
You may be wondering why these fraudsters seem to enjoy using the front of an investment firm from the United Arab Emirates? Perhaps it is because they do not have strong web presences, making them easy targets to fraudulently imitate, or because American business owners have heard through the rumor mill that there are investors in the Middle East who are “basically giving away money.” Although it is likely true that investments from sources in the Middle East happen frequently, if you notice any of the signs noted in this article be wary and remember that deals “too good to be true” often are exactly that.
About the Authors: Samuel Garcia is a Rio Grande Valle native who is a current student at Harvard Law School and a contributor at Forbes.
Joseph Gallardo is from San Antonio and is also a current student at Harvard Law School.
