Complaint Review: GerlachMarketing LLC / Gerlach Marketing / Jennifer Gerlach

I met Jennifer at a networking group that I was a member of (LeTip West Loop). During my initial consultation with her she showed me a few websites that she claimed she had successfully received grants for other clients and assured me that with my business model that she could do the same. Ms. Gerlach claimed to have 150 employees. She charged me a monthly fee of $1000.00 to write business plan, grants, create a marketing plan and provide social networking. Initially she said that 3 months she would be able to make enough traction and get me the funding that I needed for my start up.

Each time I followed up with her to check on the progress she would make excuses of some sort of health crisis she or or family were having. She claimed that she had a rare bone cancer, her father had a brain tumor, her mother had a heart attach, she fell down and was unconscious, her excuses were endless. Finally after about 2 months she produced a very generic business plan that actually had parts of an entirely different company. I stayed the course feeling sorry for her. after the initial 3 months were up she claimed that she had written me 18 grants and that 3 of them, Rotary International, Coca Cola and the Chicagoland chamber of commerce all totaling 3 million dollars were going through. She created false emails from people that did not exist (mostly from gmail accounts) substantiating and confirming that these grants were in fact going through. Finally one day she called me saying that she received the grant award documents from Coca-Cola and that I was being awarded 1.5 million dollars they were sent to her mistakenly and I should come down and sign them. (I latter learned from the Detective with the Chicago Financial Fraud Division that she was avoiding mail fraud) After reviewing the documents and calling Coca-Cola my-self we determined they were false and latter confirmed that she had created the documents and had them on in word format on her computer. After learning this I contacted all the other grant opportunities that she had supposedly applied for on my behalf to learn that not one of the 18 were real.

I have since learned through public record that this women was convicted of felony fraud in early 2011. I have also spoken to numerous other victims of hers with similar stories. Latter in the summer I ran into her at another networking event where she was farming for more victims so beware. In my opinion this women is a pathological sociopath and should be locked up in a mental institution.