Gill Hope or
Ambassador Hope of Prosperity
Studios also called The President's Legacy - Hope on
AFRICA.
*Warning* *Rip Off Report* *Important Notice*
Consumer Alert / Small Business Advisory / International Video Scams
If you have had any dealings with Ambassador
Hope, currently of Prosperity Studios, that you would like to relay on
this page, please email me. I will review before
posting.
My experiences with Gill Hope, or Ambassador Hope, as
she calls herself, and her company, Prosperity Studios, were as
follows:
Gill Hope, who calls herself Ambassador Hope and
runs a company called Prosperity Studios, hired my company, in May of 2007 to
produce a series of web videos and some DVDs for her "charity," known as
"The President's Legacy - Hope on AFRICA."
Apparently, she raises money for orphans in Africa, and these were call to
action videos. She had a very tight deadline, so we managed to book all
the crew and get everything set to shoot in under a week. We had not yet
gotten the contract or the deposit, but I made it clear that we would not shoot
without.
The day of the shoot, Gill Hope brought a deposit
check and signed the contract, which was for $17,250, plus hourly rates for
overtime, etc. By the end of post-production, the total budget for
the project was over $20,000. The project had to be completed in less than
a week, so we pushed to get all the videos done. Gill sent a courier to
pick up the DVDs while my company uploaded the videos to various sites.
We finished the project for Gill and she praised
the work we did. Feel free to view one of the videos by clicking here.
Gill Hope wrote her own scripts.
She also solicited more proposals from me,
stating that she wanted to do a monthly series of videos and she wanted me to be
her producer. However, when the second payment was due, she asked if I
could wait. The work was already done, so I asked when I could expect
payment. She put me off and put me off and, in the meantime, I did a
little research. I saw a few posts online about her that scared me.
This one was just a brief article referring to Gill Hope as a well-known
fraudster: Gill
Hope Fraud Article. This is another article referring to Gill Hope as
a fraudster: Gill
Hope as Fraud . And this last one is about Gill Hope hopefully being
caught soon for fraud: Gill
Hope Nun on the Run .
Gill Hope, Ambassador Hope, of Prosperity Studios,
still, as of September 2008, has not paid any of the amount of money she owes my
company, despite a lawsuit against her.
Since then, I have filed suit against
her and her company. Gill Hope, Ambassador Hope, Hope TV, and Prosperity
Studios left the hotel she was in in D.C. I have people call me from
Pennsylvania with Gill Hope sitings. I have been emailed horror stories
about Gill Hope cheating artists out of their money in L.A. I was recently
told of another company that has filed suit against Gill Hope right here in
Washington D.C.
The latest is a company that recently had a run in with Gill
Hope, or Ambassador Hope, told me how to report Gill Hope's criminal activity to
the FBI. If you have had a Gill Hope behave in a way that you believe is
criminal, you can report it to the FBI at: IC3
If you would like more specific
information, want to share experiences you have had with Gill Hope, or have any
questions for me, please email me at Jessica@gillhopeexperiences.com
Other Experiences with
Gill Hope (email me at Jessica@gillhopeexperiences.com if you want further information on any of the posters
below):
"I
run a fund raising company serving 501c3 non-profits. An associate
introduced me to Hope, as Hope was looking for someone to help her raise $60,000
for her organization, helping orphans in Africa. When I met with Hope, I
asked her about her 501C3 status. She said she didn't have one - which was
the first complication and red flag, but not necessarily a roadblock. So I
asked to see documents of accountability to ensure that the money I would
raise would in fact, reach the end user - in this case the orphans - and also to
allow to track overhead spending out of the donated funds. Legally, a
non-profit must be able to show a paper trail from the receipt of donated funds
to the disbursement of those funds, and ethically I could not work with an
organization that wasn't able to show that paper trail. During
this initial meeting, I asked Hope to explain how she disbursed the money
to the orphans in Africa when she didn't have an organization on the ground in
Africa to identify the specific individuals and oversee the process of
converting the money into the local currency and making sure it was used for its
intended purposes by the recipients. Gill Hope responded that she sends
the money to the orphans in Africa using Western Union, and that these
starving, parentless, and sick children that she spoke so
passionately about, were able to make their way to a Western Union, pick up
their money, and use it for the purposes it was intended for. When I
pointed out the risks of corrupt people taking the money, or people simply
stealing it from the orphans, her reply was "People are honest. Its
fine."
When
a few weeks later, I still hadn't received any documentation proving
accountability, or even legitimacy, I wasn't surprised. She contacted me and
asked me to get involved with a bank financing deal that would allow me
to get her money that she would pay me with. It sounded convoluted at
best, and like money laundering at worst. I declined the project,
asked her again for her documentation and never heard from her again. It is my
personal and professional opinion that Gill Hope, Prosperity Studios, and
her African Orphan program are fraudulent. Please do not give any money, in
any form to Ambassador Hope for her "African Orphans." There are many
many LEGITIMATE organizations working to improve the lives of children in
Africa and I would encourage you to donate to those organizations instead.
" -
Meredith
"I met Gill Hope, currently of Prosperity
Studios, at a networking event in 2005. I was impressed by her talk
of charity work and her apparently close relationship with Colin Powell. I
developed an association with her and came to find out that she was having
trouble getting funds released from her bank to be able to use in helping
orphans. She said they were desperate for the money, but she was forced to
wait until the funds got released. Eventually, she convinced me to "lend"
her the money, until her funds became available.
I took her to my bank to get her the money and my
banker warned me not to give it to her. He thought it seemed fishy.
So I suggested we wait, as I wanted time to consider. Gill Hope then made
it very clear that she was angry, using non-charitable language.
I went back and made inquiries. I called a
contact I had in Colin Powell's staff and asked about Gill Hope. They said
he had repeatedly refused to see her, as she had made numerous attempts to meet
with him. Gill Hope had also claimed to have received donations from the
CEO of Infosys. Again, I made inquiries, eventually getting to someone who
confirmed that they had never heard of her or her supposed
charity.
Gill Hope called again and repeated the urgency with
which she needed money from me. I refused. She called me horrible
names. Eventually, she left D.C. and I thought I had seen the last of
her. I was very upset to learn that she is back and, potentially, trying
to get money from others in this area for fraudulent
purposes." -Bhushan
My experience with Gill Hope goes back to 1999/2000, right
around there. I was hired in a position and was actually paid very well by her
for awhile. She was making a lot of claims back then, things like Bill Gates was
investing, she had millions of dollars coming in, etc. We had at the time
created what would have been an amazing platform for change worldwide. In
essence a worldwide doctor's office. The problem was, there was no
money.
I have kept an eye on Ambassador Hope over the years and have
warned everyone I could about her. At first, I thought she was just so blinded
by her cause that she stretched the truth. Now, I realize, she is just as scam
artist at best and an outright fraud at worst. - Brad
I
had some experiences with Gill Hope in 2006; luckily I got out of there
quickly enough. She asked me to upload videos and blogs to her
websites. We agreed upon a price (per hour) and I went to work. She
then invited some volunteers over to help her get pictures off the net of
celebrities whose fans would then channel money to orphans. I think that
was how it was supposed to work.
I was just doing the blogs, but it was apparent that
Gill Hope (or Ambassador Hope as she was calling herself) was putting up blogs
and videoblogs that were fundraising tools for her. She had given somebody
in an African village a video camera and told him what to tell the children to
say, stuff like, "Thank you Ambassador Hope. I want to be a doctor some
day." The celebrity charity thing was something akin to saying that you
have Tom Cruise set to star in your movie when Tom Cruise hasn't heard of your
movie. She was saying that all these celebrities (thousands) were
participating in her African village charity program.
So I pulled
the "volunteers" aside, and they had been told that Gill was going to meet Bono
and that if they could help another volunteer record a track, that she'd give
the track to Bono to see if he would sing on it. These volunteers were
donating time and recording studio time to have this meeting with Bono.
The "meeting" never happened. Neither did the couple million that was
supposed to be authorized by the president of some African country.
I
just kept my nose out of that other stuff. If they are fantasies,
fine. If they are real, great. Gill told me she wanted me to take
some pictures of the President and put her in there and make her look like
Marilyn Monroe. Then Gill tried to
stiff me on the payments, but I tracked down a guy that was giving her
cash, and he got me a check. So I just took my check and walked
away. The volunteers were just taken advantage of, believing Gill's
representation that she had connections and money that she did not and that she
was going to be bigger than Oprah!
Ambassador Hope tells people that celebrities and
politicians are involved in her project; and, if you stick around for a day or
two, you'll see that her business is creating that illusion. She'll grab
photos off the net, have her friend in Africa record a couple children "thanking
Ambassador Hope" for money that they want, or do a blue-screen video
sharing the good news about how close they are to getting the money -- just
waiting for the President to sign on the dotted line. And, yes, Tom Cruise
has agreed to be in my movie. Would you like to be a part of it?
