Sachaso Management Consultants Scam

Sachaso Management Consultants Scam

The Sachaso Management Consultants scam is operating a follow-on-fraud aimed at investors in Minerva Development Group Ltd (“MDG”).

MDG was closed down by the Insolvency Service earlier this month.  Here is a report from FT Advisor on the closure. 

It was not long before investors started to receive follow-on-fraud emails.  It still amazes us how quickly follow-on-fraudsters can get something out to investors.   We’ve seen a follow-on-fraud email sent to an investor less than two hours after an announcement that a company has gone into administration.  This tells us that many of the follow-on-frauds are directly linked into the sales agent companies which sell these products to investors.  This is not a scatter-gun approach i.e the fraudsters are not sending emails out to everybody and hoping some of them actually stick.  They already know that the people they are sending the emails to are investors in that product.

Here is the letter which is being sent to investors and forms the basis of the Sachaso Management Consultants scam.

Sachaso Management Consultants Scam Letter

What is interesting about this letter is that there are references to “the company in question”, “the previous company you were involved with”, “the company you were dealing with before”, “the organisations in question” and “the company in question”.  Only in one place does it actually mention the company name which in this case is described as ‘Minerva Developments’.  This is because the letter is actually a template that this scam organisation is using in many follow-on-frauds.  They’re lazy and all they want to do is type the name of the company in bold once to make it look like the letter is specific to that failed company.  They’re hoping investors won’t notice quite how lazy they are.

This is a sinister letter because they ask the investor to send through a copy of their passport or driving licence.  Once they have that there is a very real danger they’ll use it in their next scam.  We’ve had many investors contact us to say that they were scammed by a salesman called for example, Paul Bishop, but they can track him down because he was stupid enough to send them a copy of his passport to prove who he was.  He wasn’t stupid.  His name wasn’t Paul Bishop.  He just adopted the identity of an investor who had been tricked into sending a copy of their passport to him.

You can see from the letter that they give the company number for Sachaso Management Consultants Ltd.  That is a genuine company number for Sachaso Management Consultants Ltd, but these guys aren’t the genuine company.  The genuine company was incorporated in June 2014.  This letter gives the company website as sachasoltd.com.  That website domain name was bought in July 2020 and is only 3 months old.  The Sachaso Management Consultants scam is a clone of an existing company where they have stolen the company’s identity in order to scam investors.

Follow-On-Frauds can be very sophisticated.  Two weeks ago we saw one pretending to be City of London Police.  Today we saw one pretending to be from Essex Police.  It had the name of a retired Police Officer and appeared at first glance to be very believable.  These fake Police scams are not about trying to get money from investors.  They are about trying to get information which is then passed to scammers a few desks away who will use that information to try to get the money from investors.