A sophisticated scam involving a fake Luxembourg-based family office, TAM, has been targeting European startups, resulting in significant financial losses. The Commission de Surveillance du Secteur Financier (CSSF), Luxembourg's main financial regulatory authority, has issued a warning regarding TAM's "fraudulent activities."

TAM's scheme came to light after it targeted a startup within angel investor Daniel Veidlinger's portfolio. The drawback was convincing the startup to send them $50,000 in Tether. Fortunately for us, Veidlinger secretly recorded the experience—giving us a rare inside look into the tactics these fraudsters use.

Robert Maximillian Getty, the purported portfolio manager for TAM, allegedly lied about being a member of the Getty oil clan. He even claimed to be related to the family that started Miller Duty Free Shoppers. These claims did a lot of heavy lifting to establish rapport and add credibility to the operation.

Veidlinger shared his filmed footage with Sifted, exposing the playbook of the scammers.

"I didn't feel as bad after I figured out what had happened, because anybody on earth would be fooled by something like this,” - Daniel Veidlinger

TAM’s scam is the largest of 17 such cases involving fake bike infrastructure reported across Europe. Five of these startups were not so lucky, each losing amounts from $50,000 to several hundreds of thousands of dollars. These scams often consist of impersonating an investor and persuading victims to send over cryptocurrency only to vanish.

These scams have shifted, now using AI to create highly believable copy and images on fraudulent websites.

“They are setting up websites which in hindsight are AI generated but if you look at them initially you don’t know,” - an investor (who was targeted twice at the end of 2024)

Scammers are exploiting the names of legitimate, often inactive or dissolved, companies and creating fake LinkedIn profiles to circumvent initial due diligence checks. This erodes the capacity of startups to notice fraudulent actors and to keep them out.