D.C. Metro Area - Has anyone heard of Metro Dream Homes?
This company appears to be a Ponzi scheme where they induce home buyers or owners to finance the property and fork over 10% to 15% of the value of the property. In return Metro Dream Home (MDH) says they will invest the money and use the proceeds to pay the mortgage off in 5 to 7 years and then will split the value of the home with the owner. Sounds tempting, doesn't it? But if you do a little math you will find that just to make the regular mortgage payment using the proceeds from an investment that is 15% of the amount of the mortgage, it will take an investment return of about 50%! This is an amazingly high return rate... but wait, there's more! That does not pay off the original mortgage, it only makes the regular payments. To pay it off requires around 300% to 400% return on the initial investment with MDH!!! Heck, if I could get even just the 50% return, I could invest the equity in my home and never have to work again!
MDH says they are investing the money into several operations including point of sale (POS) terminals which offer ATM functions, online sales and advertising. However MDH has provided no info on how many units they have installed or how much money they are making from them. In August they were presented with a cease and desist order from the Attorney General of Maryland to stop soliciting new investors. Seems they forgot the little step of registering with the state as an investment firm. They are also under investigation for criminal charges related to the their operation being a Ponzi scheme.
There are a large number of names for the various branches of the company. This helps to make them look larger than they are and as if they had a number of viable investments. In reality they have simply conned a number of others into joining them by starting various new variations on the Ponzi or Pyramid scheme, or in many cases I believe that the new members are very much aware of the true nature of this scheme.
Some of the names are Metropolitian Grapevine, POS Dream Homes, Global Pacific Investment, YTB, HelloWorld, 5Linx, Dream Rides, Communities in Partnership, DeVine Foundation, CIP, and Billboards 4 ATMs.
There was a thread started at the scam dot com forum, but the site keeps being taken down by denial of service attacks. Another thread was started at City-data dot com, but the moderators decided that was not a topic relevant to their forums. So I am starting this one here to see if we can get a thread going that will stay up.
Hope to see Rey19, sagegriot, scamme and all the other posters here!
Last edited by ralphmalph; 10-03-2007 at 03:04 PM.
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