Thursday 7 January 2010

Dalberto Sponsors - scam!

Consumer Watchdog would like to warn the public to be extremely cautious if they see advertisements offering either work or education abroad. We have encountered many scams masquerading as recruitment companies in the last year. All involved offers of jobs, flights, accommodation and even visas to people who paid an up-front fee to a fake company. In all cases there were no real job, no flights, no accommodation. The only genuine thing was the money stolen from the victims.

Recently we have seen advertisements from a company calling itself Dalberto Sponsors. There are several reasons why we believe this is a scam. Firstly they only give cellphone numbers in the UK and South Africa, they appear not to have any land-line numbers

They also seem to be a very recent creation. Their web site was only first registered in October last year and it seems to have been copied almost entirely from other travel-related web sites. The web site also gives short profiles of the various senior managers they claim to employ but none of these people seem actually to exist. We can certainly find no trace of them.


Dalberto Sponsors give what they suggest is a business address in the UK from which they claim to operate (Unit 115 Lockwood House, London SE11 5TD, United Kingdom). However this address is actually a block of residential apartments in South London (that's it on the right).

Most importantly the claims they make should make anyone suspicious. We phoned their South African number and pretended to be interested in a job. They claimed they would find us a job working for a bank in the UK, get us a visa, accommodation and a flight all for P3,500 which we had to pay them in advance to a bank account in the UK. This is clearly ridiculous.

This is a scam and we urge readers not to respond to them.

UPDATE: We've now phoned them a few times and on each occasion they claimed they could get us any job we wanted in the UK.  But remember that the UK is in a deep recession at the moment.  Why on earth would British companies be searching for foreign workers these days?

Eventually we phoned Dalberto Sponsors in South Africa and told them that we'd seen through their lies and they weren't too pleased.  After various insults they almost threatened us but luckily it takes a little more than that to scare Consumer Watchdog!

We'll keep you updated.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

They are defiantely thieves. They only have a cell phone number in the uk because you can simply buy a chip and no need to register. they do not have a cell no as that would require credit check and they can be easilyy tracked for fraud. Also when you click about us, the person they called adam sewall is actuially kwame kilpatrick who was former mayor in detroit and is now serving jail for a crime so basically they are telling us look we are criminals. The address is definately a block of council housing flats so definately they would not be allowed to have an office there.