Company scams clients of over $200k, authorities in the U.S. allegedly refuse to investigate

  crypto.news 27 June 2024 10:03, UTC

A group of companies created by a U.S. green card holder has been scamming people for years, but authorities have refused to investigate.

According to documents received by crypto.news, Dirk De Jager, a U.S. green card holder originally from South Africa and based in Florida, scammed over 30 small business owners from different countries of at least $200,000.

“Worst case we would get our money back and best case we would increase our sales.”

Aisling Powell, a beauty business owner and one of the victims of Clients 2 Calendar, told crypto.news

Of this tally, around $6,000 was paid in USDT, the largest stablecoin by market cap. On-chain data shows that the payments were sent to the Crypto.com centralized exchange.

De Jager’s companies — Clients 2 Calendar, Scale Cave, The Virtual Club, Millionaire Performance, The Jager Lounge VIP, Outbound Kings, and DeMillionaire Mindset — promised small businesses a 2x return on investment (ROI) within 180 days.

Per a contract shared with crypto.news, De Jager’s company would refund the whole fee if the client’s business didn’t see a 100% increase in its sales.

Moreover, Powell claims that De Jager didn’t “abide by their own contract.” She added that none of the services included in the contract were done and every time the clients asked for an appointment, De Jager’s employees would ask for extra fees.

According to documents seen by crypto.news, base fee started at $5,500 and extra payments would have to be made for additional appointments.

One of the former employees at Clients 2 Calendar, who spoke to crypto.news on the condition to remain anonymous, claimed that “when they started they were making between $20-$30k per week each for the company.”

The employee said he left the company after noticing that there was no progress with the clients’ businesses.

You might also like: U.S. moves $240m Silk Road Bitcoin to Coinbase

According to the LinkedIn page of Clients 2 Calendar, most of the company’s employees are from Pakistan and the Philippines with no professional experience. Some victims claim that the employees were just hired for cold out-reach on Instagram and Facebook to lure small business owners.

Powell claimed that Clients 2 Calendar and Millionaire Performance are registered in the U.S. state of Delaware. Bruwer De Jager’s LinkedIn profile shows that he co-founded Clients 2 Calendar in March 2020 with his brother.

Millionaire Performance was created in 2021, according to its LinkedIn page.

In February, one of the victims created a Reddit thread to report the scam run by the De Jagers. It reads:

“After a month we realized that these egotistical, arrogant and unprofessional guys hadn’t got a clue how to run a business let alone get one single lead.”

Many more victims joined the discussion with one of them claiming that the “money-doubling scheme turned out to be fake.”

However, on March 8, one person, whose account was created the same day, claimed that he started making over $50,000 after connecting with De Jager. As expected, he faced a harsh reaction from one of the victims.

Powell said that she reached out to many authorities, including the South African Embassy, Florida Police, FBI and the U.S. Secret Service, for investigations, but so far none have “taken this seriously.”

She added that a U.S. Secret Service officer told her they would not investigate any online scam unless the baseline of the money scammed was $250,000.

So far, crypto.news found that 30 people have paid the base fee of $5,500 — reaching $165,000 in total — and with the extra fees, the number reaches around the $200,000 mark.

“I can imagine some are embarrassed and some just want to forget about this horrible ordeal,” Powell said. “But I really feel that the only way to stop them is by exposing them.”

Read more: State Department issues $5m bounty on OneCoin’s ‘Cryptoqueen’

Source