Sunrise Housing Group & Sun Housing Corporation
are Scam Phishing Sites
[Published June 29, 2020]
On June 16, we received an email from a woman who said that she was invited to apply for a job with Sun Housing Group Corporation by their HR Director, a woman named Cassandra Portland (cportland@sunhousingcorp.com)
According to their website (http://www.sunrisehousinggroup.com/about_us.html) “Sunrise Housing Group is a privately held national real estate investment and development company specializing in residential, hospitality, retail, and mixed-use commercial properties. Founded in 1983 by Gary Melvin, the company has become an industry leader with a portfolio of completed and current developments totaling more than 6 million square feet and $5 billion in gateway cities including NYC, Philadelphia, Washington D.C., San Francisco, Miami and Miami Beach.”
The recipient of this email did some digging and immediately found the name “Gary Melvin” listed in an article on our website about a sophisticated phishing scam disguised as a business called “Patriot Housing Group.” (Read our article called “Patriot Housing Group is a Phishing Scam.”) The images for Patriot Housing Group and emails we cited about this scam were identical to that being used for Sunrise Housing Group Corporation and Sun Housing Corporation. These scammers who are collecting people’s personal information, including social security numbers, didn’t change much from that scam to this scam. Take a look….
- The Form I9 used to collect people’s personal information is nearly identical to the form used on the Patriot Housing Group scam. But most importantly, the personal information collected by the form is sent to the same email address as in the other scam: pinnaclegroup3444@yahoo.com. (Click to enlarge images.)
- The website design and content are nearly identical between SunriseHousingGroup.com and PatriotHousingCorp.com, including the Executive Board Members whom we already proved are fake names applied to stolen images of other people. We found most of these people on TechUK.org:
- The Executive Director is supposedly named “Gary Melvin.” But he doesn’t exist, according to both Google and LinkedIn:
The Daily Scam wants to be very clear… there are two domains that are part of this phishing scam to collect personal information from U.S. citizens:
SunHousingCorp.com <–SCAM!
SunriseHousingGroup.com <–SCAM!
SunriseHousingGroup.com was registered anonymously on May 31st…
SunHousingCorp.com will redirect visitors to SunriseHousingGroup.com and was registered on June 14th.
There are two more interesting details about this phishing scam that readers should know. While researching this story and conducting a reverse image search for the Chief Financial Officer of Sunrise Housing Group, named Jeffrey David, we stumbled across another website that was also likely used to capture people’s personal information. It is called Block Housing Group. However, on June 29 we found that this website was not available at their domain BlockHousingGroup.com.
Also, on LinkedIn.com we conducted a search for Sunrise Housing Group and discovered someone identified as “Jwala Singh” listed as the “Director at Sunrise Housing Group.” Mr. Jwala Singh had only 4 connections to his LinkedIn account, no other experience listed or any other information. He claims to be from Mumbai, India.
Finally, we’re not the only ones who think this website is a scam. Check out this conversation on the Reddit community forum in early June!
We urge U.S. citizens to be EXTREMELY CAUTIOUS when they receive invitations to apply for jobs from random emails, texts and event from contacts through legitimate job sites.
Do your DUE DILIGENCE before filling out or sending personal information. Conduct Google searches for the business, and the employees listed on the website. Ask the business for an in-person conversation or video chat, and don’t take no for an answer! And if your new employer wants to send you a check in advance and asks you to deposit it and pay for things through their vendors, it is also a scam!