Complaint Review: Paul Ephremson

Location of Origin         United Kingdom

 Parties:                       Paul Ephremson

                                     ID_Experiential

 
                                  Sharona Gaines
                       
 Deemackadvertising [e-mail address.]

  

Note:  Sharona Gaines and  Deemackadvertising which doesnt seem to actually exist and may have been a temporary name] may have been unwitting accomplices.  The e-mail she used, which I believe had agmail.com domain is now an invalid e-mail.  She may have closed it, or Gmail may have become suspicious and shut it down.

 
Type:                           Probable money laundering scam

 
                                  Run, however, as an employment scam.

                                    No description of known employment scams on the


    IC3 website actually quite match this scam.

                                     Money mail scam



    Follow up to a hacking and phishing scam
 

                                    Bank Fraud scam

 
Be careful, folks.  This Ephremsen guy is a truly slick and smooth operator.  He runs
a very sophisticated scam that is less obvious than most.

 
First of all, hes smart enough not to make the upfront offer look too good to be true.  He offers real duties that sound reasonable for the job given the level of responsibility of those duties, and he gets you to do a few test things as kind of in lieu of a convenient way to interview. 

Second, hes smart enough to hide his dishonest inclinations and illegal activities for long enough to make you think hes just making mistakes, and until youve invested enough time in the work that you (naturally) want to get paid.

Third, the supposedly legitimate business, per the companys own website has allegedly been around since 1994.  IF that is true, then:

Four:   they seem to have kept from getting caught or getting exposure to the scam for an unusually long time.  Most scams you can find a wealth of information in online reports.  Theres nothing out there at all on these jokers.

I say if because if a major brand marketing agency had indeed been around since 1994, there should be a lot more informati about them out there on the Internet about them. 
 

All that comes up about them in a Google search is their own website, which looks like a real company if "slick and sleazy by the standards of U.S. taste.  They list several case studies of well-known brands, mostly U.S.-based but a few not.  But all the case studies consist of is the name of the brand, no reports or testimonials on what the company supposedly did for them.

That last point above being exactly why Im making it a priority to RUSH info on this scam out onto as many consumer scam reporting sites as possible as fast as possible.


And, Fifth:  Unlike the typical scams, this Ephremson guy seems to actually enjoy interacting [a great deal, in fact] with his victims.

He poses as a genuine manager at the first, and e-mails back and forth with thE freelancer [or employee] several times a day.

 Towards the end, he sends e-mail literally every few minutes pretty much around-the-clock.  [See details later.]

As to the job offer the alleged company makes, its all a fake and a scam aimed at getting his hands on your financial information, preferably a bank account, but in my case he tried for access to a PayPal account.

He did get that for a short time, during which two supposed U.S.-based JP Morgan Chase bank accounts got attached to my PayPal account. 

PayPal detected first the intrusion, then first that the one of the two that got confirmed first showed suspicious activity and then showed up as an invalid account.

The money in the bank accounts is supposed to be money to pay for vendors in the U.S. for a brand
roll-out.


I dont know what this Ephremson nutcase got out of the situation with me, since there were never funds in the PayPal account and very limited funds in my bank account.


In the last stage of the scam, until I blocked the sending address on my primary e-mail account, this guy has been sending me e-mails every few minutes virtually around the clock that say nothing except thank you, except for one that I told him to
stop or Id block the address on my e-mail that came back with a reply of please do.

I suspect there are three reasons he is doing this:  1) he seems to really enjoy getting person-to-person involved in causing his victims misery, so I suspect one motivation is harassment of victims, 2) by just saying thank you and not specifying for what? he wants to ensure to leave you wonder just how much more he got out of it than appears to be the case on the surface, and 3) I suspect hes also running some kind of a test by doing this, trying to determine how long its going to take for the victim to block his e-mail address.

THIS tactic why I have reason to believe he gained SOMETHING here, but the most apparent targets seem to be likely to be ruled out.

During the course of what appears to be legitimate work, he also does make mistakes but they arent the deal breaker level.

 Hes in a way schizophrenic in his dealings with the freelancer.  Hes effusive about the work at the outset, but when you really start challenging his practices he gets belligerent.  I was out of touch, and you know why?  Because I was setting up all these thousand of dollars worth of contracts.

As a scammer, hes very smart but as to legitimate business, just smart enough to keep himself credible for as long as he needs to get what he wants, whatever that is.

Unfortunately, he may get smarter from what he learned from what I advised him when it still appeared a genuine consultant opportunity.

You eventually find out that while he looks sincere and genuine, he has been actin in bad faith and lying and doing illegal things from the outset. 

But he manages to hide that until he gets about two weeks into the scam.

He even agrees to upfront payments [that he never intends to pay] and signs off on a contract on them.  He comes up with all kind of legitimate-sounding excuses [technical problems and so on] for why when your almost done your first paid work week hes still diddling with that so-called upfront payment.

Since these alleged bank accounts he managed to get attached to my PayPal account turn out to be apparently invalid accounts, I dont know just what it is he gained in this situation with me [other than three weeks of part time work for free], but it may possibly have just been a test run to see if running a money laundering scheme through PayPal would work or not.

Also, eventually, under some e-mail systems as you try to report in to this Ephremson joker, [such as a monthly rate provider, like Verizon] you may find that your e-mail provider starts picking up his digital signature as that of a known scammer.  I start getting 507 errors or something when I tried to reply to his e-mails, and eventually discovered by if there was text below MY signature [rather than paragraph-by-paragraph reply] I could get most through by deleting all of his text.  This is how I determined it was HIS digital signature setting of Verizons anti-spam detectors.  Probably some free e-mails wont find it, but the ones that are particularly vigilant about Spam, like Yahoo, probably will.

 Although, THEY are using a Yahoo account, so I dont know why Yahoo hasnt caught it.

 Dont ever accept any work from Paul Ephremson, from ID_Experiential UK, or anyone representing him or that company.

All it is is a way to get access to your bank account and use it to launder money through.

 Nothing more.

 Theres no real job, here, folks.  Just move along.

 
Further, if you have the sense to try to report it to Yahoo about his e-mail address, and mention a few things, they discover this joker has been hacking into your computer for weeks, even before the employment/money laundering scam began.  Why if he was already in the computer he needed to interact with me directly to get information, I don't know.  But it happened, and in this case, that is how this joker got caught.  I've had a remediation company on my computer much of this Sunday cleaning up and blocking this guy's/"company's" efforts, identifying he's been accessing my computer through a risky website access portal for probably a month or more.

Have nothing to do with this joker, or his so-called company.

I'll be reporting to Yahoo trying to get his e-mail account shut down and to IC3, and other consumer reporting sites.


Stay as far away from this guy as you possibly can.
 
END