Security News > 2020 > October > Promising Infusions of Cash, Fake Investor John Bernard Walked Away With $30M
September featured two stories on a phony tech investor named John Bernard, a pseudonym used by a convicted thief named John Clifton Davies who's fleeced dozens of technology companies out of an estimated $30 million with the promise of lucrative investments.
As described in Part II of this series, John Bernard is in fact John Clifton Davies, a 59-year-old U.K. citizen who absconded from justice before being convicted on multiple counts of fraud in 2015.
After eluding justice in the U.K., Davies reinvented himself as The Private Office of John Bernard, pretending to a be billionaire Swiss investor who made his fortunes in the dot-com boom 20 years ago and who was seeking investment opportunities.
Ben said he's spoken to several victims of Bernard who saw phony invoices for payments to be made to banks in Eastern Europe appear to come from people within their own organization shortly after cutting off contact with Bernard and his team.
In February 2020, Secure Swiss Data was purchased in an "Undisclosed multimillion buyout" by SafeSwiss Secure Communication AG. Shortly after the first story on John Bernard was published here, virtually all of the employee profiles tied to Bernard's office removed him from their work experience as listed on their LinkedIn resumes - or else deleted their profiles altogether.