Complaint Review: Lisa A. Wolfe

A Cautionary Warning To Small Businesses About the Public Relations Fraudster, Lisa A. Wolfe

If you are doing business or planning on doing business with Lisa A. Wolfe, a "public relations professional" in Chicago, do yourself a favor. Sit down and read this first. We're a group of teachers who have been grievously and unlawfully defrauded of $7,500 by this individual.

BACKGROUND: In 2013, our children's educational toy project engaged Lisa A. Wolfe (pictured, left) to help us launch our first product at the New York Toy Fair in February 2014. She came recommended by a K-12 educational advisor. First impressions were good. Lisa is completely plausible, marketing herself as a kind, benign old lady and dog lover who was quick to reassure us she was "towards the end of her career" and not in it for the money. Lisa A. Wolfe has the perfect resume: Clients listed from Pearson, Microsoft and McGraw Hill -- some of the biggest names in the education world. Her website lists Bill Gates, Pearson CEO Marjorie Scardino as personal business contacts - friends and personal mentors. We were thrilled to have someone seemingly so qualified and experienced brought on-board our team, which includes faculty from reputable U.S. universities.

Following lengthy discussions by phone, we agreed to pay an overall fee of $30-50k for the year, with an initial payment of $7,500 upfront -- something which is standard in the PR business, for the consultant to ask for a percentage upfront as a "deposit". In advance, and in good faith, we gave Lisa our money. However, on payment of the money by bank transfer, Lisa A. Wolfe provided no service whatsoever. Astonishingly, Lisa literally did nothing. She did absolutely no work, and even refused to add our name to her roster of paying clients. A month later, after prompting, she sent us the first draft of the press release she planned to distribute to journalists at Toy Fair, in which she unforgivably misrepresented our product -- to the extent that showed a callous and bad faith disregard for our project. Lisa clearly had no intention of fulfilling any of the paid-for services she promised, whatsoever.

-- Taking people's money for no service, is stealing. --

After expressing our concerns regarding Lisa's lack of service and seriously flawed draft release, Lisa wrote to us in an email dated January 7th, 2014, a little over a month after she had supposedly "started work", in which she stated in the first line that she had "absolutely made mistakes". In the same email, which is IP-tagged and sent from her main company server, she offered to refund our deposit money. We sacked Lisa A. Wolfe for failure to deliver proper service, and the refund we were promised has never materialized.

And so, here we are. Lisa A. Wolfe is a devious and malicious thief. Don't make the mistakes we did by trusting her. She has defrauded our children's company of $7,500 of our hard earned money, leaving us in financial hardship a month before our launch at Toy Fair 2014.

A Plea To Return Our Money

Lisa, Taking people's money for nothing, is stealing. You are an absolute thief. You have defrauded us of our money under false pretenses and provided no public relations service whatsoever. This is why your industry has such a toxic reputation. Lisa, if you can ever find it within your cold heart to return the $7,500 you stole from our children's company, you have our Bank of America details to return the money immediately. In the meantime, we will be placing warnings on Rip Off Report and Scambook, to alert other small businesses to your untrustworthy illegal practice of stealing other people's money. Lisa A. Wolfe: You are an outright thief.