Fake investors: how founders get scammed, and how to check

World Investor Week runs from 5 to 11 October 2026. It’s the tenth edition, and IOSCO, the global body of securities regulators, picked Digital Deception and Scam Alert as two of its three themes. In Italy the week is coordinated by CONSOB, which on 1 October ordered five more websites blacked out for offering investment services without authorisation. That brings the count to 1,834 since July 2019.

Those campaigns speak to savers. Founders meet the mirror image. With fake investors, nobody asks you to invest: someone offers to invest in you, as soon as you’ve paid a fee. Below are four scams that keep coming back, one paid shortcut that’s poor value rather than illegal, how to check an investor in an afternoon and what to do if you’ve already paid. New to fundraising? Start with our beginner’s map from zero to a first round.

How fake investors work: four scams aimed at founders

It usually starts with a compliment. A fund has seen your deck or your launch post and is ‘very interested’. They reply within the hour, and they’re in a hurry.

1. The advance-fee ‘investor’

The round is imaginary. The fee is real. After the interest and a call or two comes a cost to settle first: a due diligence fee (due diligence being the checks an investor runs before paying), notary costs, a ‘registration’ charge, an insurance policy or a bank guarantee. Next to the millions on offer, it looks small. That’s the design.

In June 2025 the Guardia di Finanza in Naples arrested six people accused, among other things, of fraud and unauthorised financial activity. According to Fanpage, more than 100 entrepreneurs had been promised cheap EU financing and paid upfront into foreign accounts, receiving guarantee policies that bore the European Commission’s logo. One paid €450,000 towards a €36.9 million facility. In January 2026 the Banca d’Italia warned about fake loan contracts in its name asking for ‘processing fees’. The Bank doesn’t lend to private individuals at all.

In the US the pattern has a long paper trail. Take Remington Financial Group. According to the Department of Justice, it charged entrepreneurs advance fees of more than $10,000 each in exchange for fake ‘letters of interest’. Over 1,900 victims paid, and together they lost more than $26 million. In 2014 a federal court in Pennsylvania gave one of the scheme’s key figures 16 years.

2. The term sheet that costs you money

You open the attachment. It’s a term sheet: a few pages naming the main terms of the deal, which lawyers would later turn into the final contracts. Some send a letter of intent instead, a looser version of the same thing. Holding either one feels like the finish line. Scammers know it, and that’s why they fake them.

Malpani Ventures, an Indian angel investment firm, described the routine in April 2025. An ‘investment banker’ introduces a US fund. There are calls, a meeting somewhere expensive, a term sheet for a multi-million round, then a request to pay due diligence fees upfront.

Two facts deflate it. Carta’s term sheet guide (September 2026) calls the document ‘mostly nonbinding’. And where the company covers its investors’ legal costs, which lawyer Alexander Davie calls usual practice, the bill is often settled at closing, the day the round completes, out of the money invested. None of that involves wiring money to a stranger before anything is signed. Here’s what a real seed term sheet contains.

3. The cloned firm

Here the fund exists, and so does the partner. The person writing to you is someone else. CONSOB’s 1 October notice warns about cloned emails and websites, counterfeit profiles and AI-generated content; in September the Banca d’Italia flagged deepfake videos of its Governor, Fabio Panetta, pushing investment platforms.

Often the giveaway is one letter. In a case investigated by Check Point and reported by Dark Reading in December 2019, attackers registered two lookalike domains, each with an extra ‘s’, and slipped between a Chinese venture capital firm (a fund investing other people’s money in young companies) and an Israeli startup. Somewhere in 32 emails they swapped the bank details, and the $1 million seed investment went to them.

4. The crowdfunding site that isn’t authorised

With equity crowdfunding, a crowd of small investors buys shares in your company through an online platform. Since 11 November 2023, the only platforms allowed to operate in Italy are those authorised under the EU crowdfunding regulation. CONSOB or the Banca d’Italia grants the licence, and every authorised provider sits in a single register kept by ESMA, the EU markets authority. A ‘portal’ promising to fill your round that isn’t on it gets no money, and no scan of your passport. How real campaigns run: equity crowdfunding in Italy.

Paid investor lists and pay-to-pitch: poor value, not always fraud

To be fair, not everyone who charges founders is a crook. Investor databases, ‘meet the investors’ evenings, pitch contests with an entry fee: all legal, and a few are worth it.

Writing for Crunchbase in November 2025, Jaclyn Robinson named the ones to watch: groups posing as angel syndicates that charge founders $5,000 to $20,000, dressed up as due diligence, and investor ‘forums’ with tickets of up to $10,000. Her argument is hard to beat. Why would someone about to invest in your company drain it first?

Before buying a list, try building your own investor target list. And notice which way the money moves in the programmes founders compete to join: Y Combinator invests $500,000 in each company it takes (here’s how to apply to Y Combinator).

How to check if an investor is real

Give it an afternoon. If something doesn’t add up, stop right there.

1. Type the firm’s web address yourself, then hold it up against the email domain, one letter at a time.
2. Reach two portfolio founders through their own company sites. Did the fund invest? Did anyone ask them for money?
3. Check the partner’s LinkedIn story against past employers, deals reported in the press and people who’d vouch for them.
4. Search the name in the registers below.
5. Ask for a video call booked through the firm’s official address. The SEC treats a refusal to talk by phone, video or in person as a warning sign.
6. If bank details change, confirm by phone on a number you found yourself.

Where to look	What it tells you	Who it covers
CONSOB warnings and blacked-out sites	Whether a name has been flagged for unauthorised activity	Sites and firms offering investments in Italy without authorisation
CONSOB registers of investment firms	Whether a firm may provide investment services in Italy	Italian SIMs, EU and non-EU firms working in Italy
Banca d’Italia, Albi ed elenchi di vigilanza	Registration number, name, registered office	Banks, financial intermediaries (art. 106 TUB), payment and e-money institutions
OAM, Verifica agenti e mediatori	Whether a credit broker is registered	Loan brokers and agents, for when the ‘investment’ turns out to be a loan
ESMA register of crowdfunding providers	Whether a platform is authorised under the EU regulation	Crowdfunding platforms across the EU, Italy included
IOSCO I-SCAN	Alerts from regulators in other countries	Firms flagged by IOSCO members
SEC IAPD and FINRA BrokerCheck (US)	Registration, employment history, violations	US investment advisers and brokers

A clean result proves less than it seems. The SEC warns that impersonators copy real names and registration numbers. So a register can confirm the firm exists. It can’t tell you whether the person in your inbox works there.

How does a legitimate intermediary work?

There’s nothing odd about paying an adviser to get you ready for a round, or to make introductions. A legitimate one passes four tests:

• You can verify who they are: a company, a named person, an address.
• A written mandate, with scope, duration and fees, comes before any introduction.
• Nobody asks you to pay to ‘release’ a term sheet or hold your place in a round.
• Regulated work stays with authorised firms. CONSOB blacks out sites that offer investment services without authorisation.

That’s how we work at Adaxit. We prepare founders to raise and, when a company is ready, introduce it to investors who fit, under a written mandate. We don’t provide investment services, make public offers or invest. Anyone asking for a fee in our name to release funding isn’t us: check who we are against what you’ve been told.

What to do if you’ve been targeted

Haven’t paid? Stop replying and keep everything. If you have, speed matters more than pride.

1. Stop paying. No second fee to free up the first, and nothing for anyone offering to recover your money.
2. Ring your bank that same day. Ask: can the transfer still be stopped, or recalled?
3. Don’t delete a thing. You’ll want the emails with their full headers, the domains, chat exports, the term sheet and the payment receipts.
4. Go to the police. Online fraud is the Polizia Postale’s job. In Lazio a pilot scheme has been running since 15 June 2026: you start the complaint (denuncia) online, then confirm it in person at a police office within 48 hours.
5. File a complaint with CONSOB, online or by PEC (Italian certified email). It acts against unauthorised operators but can’t recover money for individuals.
6. Tell the real firm if its name was used. In the US, report to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center.

Red-flag checklist before you sign or pay

• Any fee before the money arrives, whatever it’s called.
• A payee that isn’t the firm: a personal account, a third company, a foreign bank with no link to the fund.
• An email domain one character off, or free webmail for a senior partner.
• Pressure. ‘The committee meets on Friday.’
• A term sheet before anyone has asked hard questions about your numbers.
• No partner on video, ever.
• A name on a CONSOB or I-SCAN warning list.
• Portfolio founders you can’t reach, or who’ve never heard of the fund.

Real investors ask hard questions long before a term sheet. See what investors look for in a first-time founder and what they check in due diligence, seed to Series A.

This article is general information, not legal or financial advice. Rules and scams change: if you think you’ve been targeted, talk to your bank, the police and a lawyer before taking any other step.