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Cecilia Consulting USA


Country United States
State Illinois
City Chicago
Phone 61-0403-510-510
Website http://www.ceciliausa.com/

Cecilia Consulting USA Reviews

  • Nov 2, 2015

My wife and I could potentially have lost around $200,000 to Connor Addis and his property scam, along with around 8 other Australian investors.

She first heard of Cecilia Consulting USA on Facebook in February-March 2015, promising 20% returns within 3 months on Chicago property. My wife's cousin lives in Chicago, and her husband is a property lawyer, so we felt we were in a good position to cross-check any claims before investing.

We dealt with both Connor Addis (an Australian, working in both London and Chicago) and his agent Paul Parkin (an Englishman, based in Dubai); they were working in collaboration with Gregg Burnett (an American property dealer in Chicago). The properties were shown as (for example) being worth up to $180,000 but acquired at only $100,000, promising strong local demand for both buying or renting. Monies were to be transferred via a Chicago attorney, Brian Tharp, verified by our cousins as being in good standing with the official attorney registration authority ARDC. Mr Addis and Mr Burnett claimed they would make their profit on "the back end of the deal".

My wife signed her contract and bought one house in April; I followed suit a month later. We planned to visit the properties during our forthcoming overseas vacation in September, but received a distressed call from Paul Parkin in August saying the scheme had collapsed as the properties were virtually worthless, and that Gregg and Connor could potentially be going to jail. When we tried to meet up with Paul in in transit in London, he cancelled at the last minute, claiming his father had a major car accident, dying later that night.

We contacted Connor Addis, who verified the value of the properties as only around $15,000, claiming they had been misrepresented to him by Gregg Burnett. He admitted that invested money had been split between him and Mr Burnett in a 1:2 ratio, but claimed he had no money to repay us. He suggested we contact Mr Burnett's attorney John Klytta, who replied quickly and made an appintment, whereas Brian Tharp hung up on the one occasion I got through on the telephone and replied to none of several emails requesting a meeting. He suggested we use another agent to proceed with rehabilitation and resale/rental if we wished to proceed.

We arrived in Chicago in mid-September, and met with helpful Mr Klytta, who verified that the property titles had been transferred to us, but that all the remaining money had been transferred to Burnett and Addis, and than no attempts at rhab had taken place, showing us the spreadsheet of the money trail. We inspected the very damaged properties in Chicago, located in the dangerous southside area. The cited high market values referred to sales from 2002-2004, well before the GFC property price collapse.

In subsequent calls and emails, Mr Addis stated all negligence was due to Mr Burnett; he has made no effort to repay any of his 1/3 of the money. Mr Burnett has also made no effort to repay his 2/3 of the money, but belatedly offered to proceed with the rehab using his own workers, then split any profit on the after-sale proceeds.

We have decided instead to put in the extra funds ouselves and proceed with rehab/rental using a completely separate local company. We are making a composite report to the Chicago Attorney General on the scam (in collaboration with all the fellow Australian investors), as well as a parallel report to the Australian Competiton and Consumer Commision, plus reporting the involved attornies to the ARDC.

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