Do not buy, attempt to sell, give samples to or seek or accept advice/information about ambergris from the following:
Tony Wells – AKA Antony Daniel Wells.
Jo Smith – AKA Julia Claire Charlotte Smith
Nabil Valiulla
Josef de Lapp
Pat Lillis
Bernard Perrin
Claudine Bisiaux
Terry O’Shea
Dallas Bradley
Mustafa Kassim -AKA Mus Hassan
Bipin Patel
Akhataurzzaman Chowdry
Farook Kassim (Farook the Crook)
Bruce Liang – AKA Bruce Longjin, China and NZ.
Flinder Gao – AKA Xiang Gao, China.
Steven J Rowlands
Vera Thoss-Fitzsimmons
Ruairidh Macleod
Garry McPhail
Ambergris Connect
Matt Turner (NZ)
Ambergris NZ
Ambergris Canadia
Ambergris India
Ambergris Europe
Ambergris Bahamas
Ambergris Africa
Ambergris Hunter
Celtic Ambergris
Al Bogari Trading
Rising Phoenix
Ambergris USA
Coronation Ambergris
University of Plymouth (UK)
University of Bangor (UK)
University of Copenhagen
Facebook Ambergris Public Group (FAPG)
Facebook Ambergris/Ambregris Buy and Sell (Mustafa Kassim)
Or the various Etsy, Ebay, Amazon etc. sites of the above named. Those sites can be identified by their price of ambergris; US$40 a gram or above. (High quality white ambergris retails online for around US$15 a gram in genuine circumstances.)
Ambergris Beware has provided ample opportunity for FAPG to sort out its racket and cease deliberately deceiving people. They haven’t.
The above named individuals and organisations are associated in an arrangement to deceive people and encourage them to discard their ambergris. While reducing supply on the market is one motivation another is to generate an environment of distrust and chaos in the ambergris trade. The intended result is to make the market appear rife with corruption and criminality so that people will be deterred from seeking and using ambergris and therefore seek alternatives. It is the “alternatives” that are bankrolling this campaign. The above named individuals and organisations are merely the “hired hats”. There are three possible bank-rollers for funding this campaign, two Swiss companies and a US company. While they all benefit to some degree from this campaign we have our spotlight on Firmenich.
We refer to three primary hired hats: Tony Wells, Jo Smith and Nabil Valiulla.
Tony Wells and Jo Smith are directors of Ambergris Connect which they founded in UK on 17 May 2017. Its gross fiscal value at 2019 was 5800 pounds, making it a shell company. It does not function as a trading entity. It is apparent from this alone that Ambergris Connect does not broker ambergris as the directors claim.
Instead it is a facade for a scam company designed not only to deceive but also to encourage people to send them ambergris (samples) and also for others to buy samples from them. Those sending samples will invariably be told its not ambergris even when it is. Those samples will then be sold.
When Ambergris Connect published its website in June 2017 it included a chapter in its “Identification” page called the “spoon test” or “paper test”. The alleged test was (and is) a fake. The spoon test involved melting suspected ambergris in a spoon and allowing it to reset. Tony Wells and Jo Smith claimed that upon resetting ambergris would invariably be “tacky, sticky and glossy” for hours, days and even weeks thereafter. This is complete nonsense. Ambergris that was hard before melting will reset to hard. It will set much like wax and will break if bent, like wax, It does not reset to glossy but will return to matt. It may darken somewhat.
Ambergris Connect (and FAPG) call the spoon test a definative test and state that if it did not reset to “tacky, sticky and glossy” then it was most certainly not ambergris.Within four months from the inception of Ambergris Connect they were using the fake test on FAPG and have been and still are fooling a lot of people who most probably have real ambergris.
However sometime in mid 2018 the chapter in Ambergris Connect identifcation page dissapeared as it did almost on FAPG. Ambergris Beware have noted that Tony Wells has referred to the fake test on 25 August 2019 and again on 25 January 2020.
Tony Wells was a IT consultant prior to Ambergris Connect. His role is to manage the various scam websites and social media pages. He has no experience or knowledge of ambergris. Jo Smith just goes along for the ride. She also has no experience or knowledge of ambergris. Pat Lillis is an Irish beachcomber who has picked up a few pieces of ambergris so has a very limited amount of experience. Nabil Valiulla’s knowledge is that of the others – a con-artist, who knows little of ambergris. However experience isn’t necessary when all they are saying is “its not ambergris” its graded oil” ,”fat”, “sea cucumber” etc…
FAPG is heavily contrived. It includes only those posts that reflect FAPG’s intention; to deceive. FAPG publish their own fake posts provided by its large network of Facebook scammers. Its supposed to provide an illusion of knowledge, experience and balance. The flaw in this is when someone turns up with real ambergris they have to knock them. Tony Wells and Nabil Valiulla play the good-cop/bad-cop routine. Tony Wells plays good cop as he will be the one returning the fake negative to any test he alleges he has done, and Nabil Valiulla plays bad cop, so that the punter is prepared for the knock.
There is plenty of examples to chose from but we selected this one posted one 8 August 2019. When FAPG saw the( below) photo they knew they were looking at probable ambergris. They assessed the punters profile and determined it was a woman from the west coast of the North Island of New Zealand. They know that the west coast of NZ is a hot-spot for NZ white ambergris. They also noted that the piece was about 200 – 300 grams making it a relatively significant find. Just the sort of find that Tony Wells intended to see damaged if not destroyed. There was no good-cop/bad-cop for this punter. She was going to get two bad cops and they were going to hit her hard and fast. The first bully Akhtaruzzaman Chowdry starts with an authoritative appearing and exclamation marked “Its not ambergris!”. The second bully-boy Tony Wells kicks in with “…its not ambergris.” While he has his victim dazed he tells her to break the piece in half. The punter, not knowing the consequences of this complies.
Over the years Ambergris Connect and FAPG have coerced a lot of people to discard many kilograms of ambergris. Every kilogram of ambergris removed from the market is a kilogram of synthetic Toxic Ambrox being sold by manufacturers such as Firmenich. The alleged negativity in the ambergris market generated and promoted by Ambergris Connect and FAPG serves only to encourage people to abandon ambergris and seek the synthetic alternatives. It was written by a recent commentator that there is a worldwide boycott of ambergris. There is NOT a world wide boycott of ambergris. There is a concerted campaign of deception and denigration that is designed to damage and destroy the ambergris industry and its a campaign that companies like Firmenich benefit from.The methods used in this campaign are criminally unlawful and Ambergris Beware intends to see those culpable parties prosecuted and convicted.
A negative profile of the ambergris market is a priority of Ambergris Connect and FAPG. This has included them creating their own negative pages on Facebook such as Amber Gris and Duncan Harold Payne. The latter, in arrangement with the former, was supposed to have generated a media event which Ambergris Connect and FAPG hoped to manipulate.
With the assistance of New Zealander – Duncan Harold Payne, FAPG constructed a page that appeared to promote and sell fake ambergris. A fake sales scenario in Singapore was devised and emails were sent to NZ Government Ministers and NZ Herald (newscasters). The media was to have begun a story of Duncan Harold Payne being scammed by others in Singapore only to discover, in the course of investigation, that Duncan Harold Payne was in fact the scammer. The criticism that Duncan Harold Payne had leveled at Ambergris Connect and FAPG would also then be considered fake thus providing Ambergris Connect the opportunity to step into the limelight and present themselves as the good guys devoting their time, money and effort to educate and stem fraud etc… . Accordingly the ambergris industry would be cast into a dark place of scammers and cheats and ironically the real scammers would appear as heroes. However the media didn’t fall for it. The otherwise potentially plausible plan was poorly executed. And eventually Ambergris Beware exposed the fake pages resulting in FAPG deleting them.
The syndicate of scammers manipulates the algorithms of Google and Facebook with their substantial collective. The fake FAPG page “Amber Gris” had 5000 followers, many from Islamic countries. FAPG employed these “followers” to cause Facebook to temporarily block our link, but the block was subsequently removed. Just recently we noticed that the Ambergris Connect website has taken an exponential rise in the Google search engine ratings. Only a couple of weeks ago the site was on about page 15. It now sits at about page 4. The only way it could achieve this is through manipulation, that is simply getting their 5000 “followers” to hit the website and complete and send forms within a short period, say 100 hours. Ambergris Connect and FAPG are doing this because they know their days are numbered on Facebook so are preparing to continue their scam via the web. They also know that Ambergris Beware is also going to undergo an exponential rise in Google ratings, only under genuine circumstances, so they are hoping to stay above so they may scam people before we can warn them.
When someone searches “ambergris” they invariably get the same sites and it is unfortunate that nearly all the sites are controlled by the scammers or are media sites spouting misinformation and sensationalism. It appears that the fakes, scammers and mis-informers control the information supply about ambergris. The illusion that the scammers create is that ambergris costs $40 a gram or more to buy. It doesn’t. But it makes ambergris appear unaffordable. The manipulation of search engine algorithms and maintenance of false excessive pricing is another deliberate effort to damage the ambergris industry.
A sister page to FAPG exists. Ambergris/Ambregris Buy and Sell is administrated by Mustafa Kassim, a Somalian national allegedly living in the UK. It is the page people go to to get a second opinion to that of FAPG however Mustafa Kassim is set to parrot the line given by FAPG. Some administrators of FAPG comment on this page. Click here for Mustafa Kassim.