Donna
8 months ago
I was in need of help since my stimulus check ($1200) was taken from me so someone else could claim my money. So I looked online and found this website "Guaranteed Donations" at www.guaranteeddonation.com. They make you go through sort of an application process where they ask that you write a brief essay explaining why you need a donation, what you plan on doing with the donation you might get and why you should be chosen to have a donation sent to you. So I wrote a very heartfelt, emotional essay that I had emailed to directly from the website. In about a day or two I received an immediate response that replied to my essay from the website. The email went something like, "you have been chosen to have donations sent to you, we feel you would be a great candidate to have our donors that could express interest in you and we will get back with you when we habe found a donor for you. In addition to either that first email or another one they sent me right after explained in detail what I needed to do in the meantime to get set up with them and another website (Stripe.com) where I would be going to process, withdrawl, and email receipts of all the transactions("donations") they would give me to process. It would further explain how to go about setting up an account with the other website, Stripe. They offered support if there were any issues with the verification process on the other website, Stripe, and when I did, they even went as far as to setting up a website for me to use on the other website, which was a requirement in the verification process with Stripe. Guarnteed Donations also explained what to expect as far as the donations go and how I would be receiving them, that I would be allowed to receive up to and no more than 7 donations in total all year. That the donations I can expect to receive would be anywhere from $2,000 to $10,000 in range and that out of every donation, Guaranteed Donations would be taking a 40% donation fee, for finding me the donors. After I got my account set up on the Stripe website, the Guaranteed Donation people, which seemed like I was mainly communicating with one man that went by the name, Timothy Jon, after sometime that was the only person I would be communicating with, through emails, about everything. He would ask me for updates and when my account would be verified and would ask for screenshots once the account was verified. Right after everything was good to go, literally a day later they told me I had my first donor and they would be sending me the information on how to process the donation. Another day passed when I received an email from the "Admin department" from Guaranteed Donations with all the information for the first donation. The amount of the donation, which at the time was $2900 and sone change. But because it was coming from a donor in Canada, once the donation would process from the other website the amount that would transfer over to my account would be $2200 and some change. It also contained all the donor's information, address, email, card information, where to email the receipt of the processed donation. Also, attached was a pdf with a Authorized Donation slip which had all the donor's card information and what seemed to be an electronic signature, basically stating that the donor authorized this transaction to take place. Now, I admit, it did seem alittle strange that they would trust someone with all that information but everything else seemed to be on the up, I just believed that we were on a trusting basis so I proceeded to process the payment and emailed a screenshot of the payment going through to the Guaranteed Donation people per their request. I had to wait 2 days for the website to process any payment so in meantime the donation people sent another email with instructions on what their fee would be from this donation and how to send it to them. They gave me two choices on how to send it to them, either I use the CashApp or I withdrawl the fee from my bank and find a Bitcoin ATM, scan the QR code they emailed to me and send it to them through the Bitcoin ATM. Since I didn't feel comfortable caring that much money, which they ended up asking for alittle bit over 40%, turned out to be $845, I choose to send it via CashApp. They had all the details on who to send it to and how, step by step. They also explained that depending on how much each donation fee is varies by the amount of each donation. So everything went fine, I recieved my first donation, sent them their fee and everything seemed to go pretty smoothly. Then a day passed and they sent me another donor's information, in the same fashion as the first one, just with different donor information. This one was much larger than the first one, the donor was sending me $9,989 and some change. As before I did the same thing as they instructed me to do before. This time Stripe processed $6,498 or something close to that, where then the donor fee I had to pay them turned out to be $2,898, or something close to that. (The amounts are only off by alittle bit.) However this time, because it was so much, I had no choice but to go to my bank, withdrawl the money, and then proceed to send the money through a Bitcoin ATM which is right by my house actually. The donation people were on my about getting them their fee pretty quick, and staued in contact with me the whole day until I emailed them a receipt that I had sent it, which I understood why, but they weren't really bothering me too much, they seemed to be just as concerned about it as anyone would be but not overly bothersome, not to raise any flags. That was Friday, right before the Memorial day weekend. I didn't think anything badly about this whole thing because everything seemed to so believable this whole time. And the donation people also told me they already had another donor lined up for me to process on Tuesday after the holiday weekend, since Stripe wouldn't be able to process any payments till after the holiday anyway. They emailed me first thing Tuesday morning with another authorized donation. This time is was for $12,000 and some change, not that exact amount, it was for alittle bit more. Well, I went to the my ATM first because I needed to pay a bill and my bank proceeded to let me know that my account was overdrawn by over $5,900, both transactions that went through last week through my Stripe account were taken back! Which caused my account to be well overdrawn since most of the money sent to me was still in the account besides the money I sent to the donation people for their donation fees. They took everything that processed through the Stripe account from both donors, back. My first thought was, great, I got scammed by these donation people. I had even done research on them beforehand to see if I could find any scam reports on this website and there wasn't anything I could find. So I emailed the donation website and told them what was happening and they proceeded to instruct me to wait for a response from Stripe and that their legal team would take care of this for me. I repeatedly emailed them to respond with what was going to happen, how were they planning on dealing with this and begging them to tell me if they were phonies or a real organization. They have stopped replying to my emails and now Stripe has finally emailed me back wanting me to call them to talk about what happened. I literally got screwed and reamed a new one because they got me involved in this. Now I don't know what to do.