HelloRyse I got scammed out of $500 by HelloRyse almost a year & a half ago in a fundraising event. Toronto Ontario

I invested in a startup technology company called HelloRyse Inc that was doing a IPO stage. This company scammed me as well as other investors. I initially invested $500 between December 2021 and January 2022.

The person that I primarily contacted with is Andre Munteanu, who was in charge of managing the investing/fundraising aspect of the company.

Andre and I emailed each other for almost a year, the minimum investment was $500 and Andre informed that HelloRyse was gonna sell these smartshades through Home Depot, which was a lie, because they're not on the Home Depot website.

The only place I know of that sells these smartshades are through their website or Amazon. About 6 months later or so, the company's founder/CEO Trung Pham decide to raise the minimum investment to $1000 in another fundraising round.

Fast forward to September 2021, Andre wouldn't tell me how the company was doing financially, whether they were still trying to go public. Andre told me that he would send me the quarterly reports in October or November 2021

I still have not received these quarterly reports. This was the first red alert that made me realize that this was a scam orchestrated by Trung and Andre. When I confronted Andre concerning this via email, he denied all these accusations about it being a scam.

I told him about Home Depot and that HelloRyse should refund all of the money to the investors by email. Andre said that they wouldn't do that. This was between January and February of this year. 

The last time that I heard from Andre was in February, so basically the company has been ghosting me for months now.

A few weeks ago, I received an email from Trung, trying to me and other investors to invest in some promissory notes with a minimum investment of $10,000. In the email, it says that it's very low risk, with an interest rate of 18%. 

In this new promissory note investment, Trung is trying to reach $1,000,000 and they are close since they already raised $850,000 in promissory notes. I didn't invest in this promissory note, because I have always felt that company was running a scam.

I reported HelloRyse to the FTC over a month ago, but I haven't heard anything since. I would like the company to refund all the money to the investors and I feel that it should be heavily investigated. I suppose, it's very difficult to investigate RYSE Inc. because it is based in Canada.

An attorney referred me over to this website, so that's why I'm making a report here. If you have any questions from or need any other information, please reach out to me by phone or email