My name is Andy and I am a general manager of an American manufacturing company that just lost over $6,200 when we were trying to borrow money. I am real person that was defrauded by Platinum Financial, OC. Don't let it happen to you. I believe in honest business and I believe in stopping this company from tricking anyone ever again.
Tom Leonard and Mike Ruiz of Platinum Financial, OC will tell you what you want to hear during the "APPROVAL" process. They will send you an email with the word "approved" in all capital letters based on financials that you sent them. Once "approved" and you give them the go ahead, they will send you documents that will most likely not have the same interest rate on them that they approved you for. When you address the error, they will apologize and fix it but they will hope that you don't notice it. After all a quoted interest rate means nothing once you sign a lease agreement. When that is all said and done and you mail in your signed lease agreement and your first and last month's lease payments, assuming that you are trying to obtain equipment financing, they will say that based on new information, you are no longer approved. They had access to all of this information ahead of time. They simply told you that you were approved so that they can get your money. Will this happen to you? Maybe. I'm simply telling you exactly how this happened to me. Keep reading.
I recently applied for a corp only loan which means that I want the loan to only take into account the company's cash balances and not rely on personal guarantees or personal credit reports/scores. Mike Ruiz and Tom Leonard of Platinum Financial, OC from Orange California said that I was approved for just that. My company has the money to buy the equipment outright but I believe in equipment financing because the rates are very low. Once I signed their contract and sent them a check, I stopped hearing from them. The vendor that was supposed to get money from them for my equipment emailed me a week later saying that they did not contact him as promised. I panicked. After several days of attempting to contact Mike, Tom finally said that he would give me an update.
His update was that I was no longer approved for corp-only. He asked for additional financials which I provided and that wasn't good enough either. Finally, I agreed to provide a personal guarantee but I stipulated that since I'm doing a personal guarantee, I want working capital as well. Working capital was part of the original agreement. I didn't want to provide a personal guarantee, get approved for the equipment, and then have to jump through the same hoops for the working capital. The working capital would only be necessary if the equipment loan was back on track. The company has plenty of working capital otherwise.
Tom Leonard ended up forging my signature and obtained the working capital loan which he said would be easier than the equipment loan. I have the following emailed statement from Tom admitting to forging my signature:
" The working capital bank requires you sign their application. The one before I did it for you and did a signature scan but I don’t have his signature so I cant do that with his info… "
The working capital loan was quoted at 7.25% but yet again after we were approved the paper work came in with 10% on it. The funny this is that the 10% isn't a yearly interest rate, it's daily. On a loan of $50,000, we would end up paying over $22,000 in interest. Keep in mind, as stated previously, we only needed the money if we got an equipment loan. But, there is no way, that we would borrow at what is considered "payday loan" rates. We have been in business for 20 years. We have been very profitable even amidst the recession which hit our industry, construction, very hard. We have plenty of money in our bank account. We had no intention of borrowing working capital at exorbitant interest rates to facilitate the equipment loan that we were no longer approved for. Even if the equipment loan was approved, we would never borrow working capital at anyting more than 10% annually. 10% is already a yearly interest rate that I would most likely have had said no to and used our own money instead.
I asked to get my original deposit back after I realized that this company just offered my company the equivalent of a "payday" loan. We are not desperate for money. We are a reputable company that currenty has yearly interest rates of under 7%. This attempt at offering us a "payday" loan was embarrassing to our business acumen. We are not fools. They sent me their refund process which I believe may take up to 90 days. I am very confident that I will not get my money back. I only sent them a signed contract and money becauase they said I was approved. Once they had my money, end of story. I was duped.