BEWARE Techvestor / Scoutpads

[Michelle Chan]

I want to caution everyone against investing with Techvestor (techvestor.com) or related companies Scoutpads, Metallic Blue Development (MBD) and Superhost Labs. All of them are centered around Sief Khafagi and his partners Brian Dozier, Sabrina Guler, Corbin Weinerman.

Before starting Techvestor, Sief and others managed a number of real estate investments in Los Angeles under the Scoutpads brand with MBD as the operator. Over the years they signed up over 200 investors, primarily employees of Facebook/Meta (where Sief used to work) and Apple (where Sabrina used to work). MBD is now in chapter 7 bankruptcy with at least $18M of investor money missing. My husband and I are among the affected people and we lost hope of recovering any substantial portion of our investment.

Things started to go south in mid-2021. Sief suddenly distanced himself from Brian and essentially stopped all communication with investors. More and more people were speaking up about projects exceeding deadlines, ignored withdrawal requests or delays blamed on COVID, family problems, city slowness, ...

Instead of taking responsibility, Sief decided to play the victim card and blame everything on Brian, who most of us never met. He pivoted to STR projects, rebranded as Techvestor and since then brushed off questions about Scout pads or MBD. He shut down scoutpads.com, removed Scoutpads from his LinkedIn page and is trying hard to silence any negative reviews of him or his businesses. He even had the audacity to try to manipulate us into signing an agreement waiving our rights to go after him in court.

Earlier this year, several larger investors forced MBD into involuntary bankruptcy (case 2:22-BK-16483-ER, U.S Bankruptcy Court, Los Angeles Division). Everybody is now learning about the mess that Sief lured us into. Court hearings revealed that instead of acquiring advertised properties, Scoutpads/MBD only purchased options on those properties and never exercised them! There is also a forensic analysis showing fabricated dates on our contracts to re-allocate money to older projects. Many more disturbing facts and allegations are available in public court documents: https://unicourt.com/case/pc-bk5-metallic-blue-development-llc-2058799.

Bankruptcy cases can take years to unravel and most of us are expecting to recover pennies on the dollar at best.

Make your own judgement on trusting people with a track record like that.