{"id":199930,"date":"2026-03-21T02:10:27","date_gmt":"2026-03-21T02:10:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/199930\/"},"modified":"2026-03-21T02:10:27","modified_gmt":"2026-03-21T02:10:27","slug":"orlando-economic-partnership-ignored-warning-about-goliath-venture-investigative-journo-says","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/199930\/","title":{"rendered":"Orlando Economic Partnership ignored warning about Goliath Venture, investigative journo says"},"content":{"rendered":"

Five months before Christopher Delgado was arrested<\/a> over allegations he was running a $328 million Ponzi scheme, the Orlando Economic Partnership<\/a> received a warning that its investment from Delgado raised red flags.<\/p>\n

The alert came from Danny de Hek<\/a>, an investigative journalist from New Zealand.<\/p>\n

\u201cI am writing to raise a serious concern about your website\u2019s \u2018Join Our Top Investors \u2014 CHAMPIONS FOR BROAD-BASED PROSPERITY\u00ae\u2019 section, where Christopher Delgado and Goliath Ventures Inc. are currently listed,\u201d de Hek<\/a>\u00a0wrote\u00a0in a Sept. 21, 2025, email<\/a> to the Orlando Economic Partnership.<\/p>\n

\u201cI want to make you aware that my investigation, along with multiple whistleblowers and victims, has uncovered overwhelming evidence that Goliath Ventures Inc. is operating as a crypto-based Ponzi scheme.\u201d<\/p>\n

He continued his warning in the email.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cBy promoting Christopher Delgado and Goliath Ventures Inc. as \u2018top investors,\u2019 the Partnership risks unintentionally lending credibility to what I and many others believe is a fraudulent operation. This not only damages the reputation of your organization but could also make you a target of legal and reputational fallout once the scheme unravels \u2014 as has happened with other organizations that unknowingly promoted similar scams.\u201d<\/p>\n

The email from de Hek went to Orlando Economic Partnership CEO Tim Giuliani<\/a> and was cc\u2019d to 37 other employees at the organization focused on recruiting new business to Central Florida.<\/p>\n

Then came silence.<\/p>\n

Neither Giuliani nor anybody else wrote back, said de Hek, who shared a copy of his email with Florida Politics.<\/p>\n

Nobody reached out with any questions about de Hek\u2019s investigation or voiced any concerns, said de Hek, who focuses on uncovering Ponzi schemes and scams.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m upset with the Orlando Economic Partnership people,\u201d de Hek said. \u201cThey just ignored it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m not a nobody,\u201d he added. \u201cI\u2019ve been featured in a two-page printed edition of The New York Times<\/a>. I\u2019ve been in the Guardian newspaper. I\u2019ve helped them publish 14 articles about one of the scams that I busted, a $1.9 billion dollar scam. I\u2019ve been in a mini documentary with Bloomberg.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"Image via the Orlando Economic Partnership\u2019s website.<\/p>\n

A day after de Hek\u2019s warning email to the Orlando Economic Partnership, Delgado sued de Hek for defamation in Orange Circuit Court.<\/p>\n

\u201cWith no inside knowledge, no firsthand information, and no evidence beyond publicly available marketing materials, De Hek published and promoted in a dizzying number of online posts, articles, and videos proclaiming Goliath was a fraud,\u201d the Goliath Ventures lawsuit said<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cDe Hek has gone beyond words and actively contacted Goliath\u2019s partners, investors, donees, and other persons to cause these persons to disassociate with Goliath. The real-life consequences of De Hek\u2019s actions have caused Goliath millions of dollars.\u201d<\/p>\n

Everything changed in February, when Delgado was arrested on money laundering and wire fraud charges.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Goliath Ventures immediately dismissed its defamation lawsuit against de Hek, and the Orlando Economic Partnership quietly scrubbed Goliath from its website<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It appeared Delgado had given the Partnership at least $200,000. Goliath was marked as an investor in the same category as Disney, the Orlando Magic and the University of Central Florida.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe were contacted after Goliath became a member by the independent New Zealand blogger, Danny de Hek, which caused us to pose questions to Goliath. We were subsequently misled with the responses, as were many other community organizations and investors who did their own due diligence,\u201d said Orlando Economic Partnership Senior Vice President of Marketing and Communications Laureen Martinez in a statement Friday.<\/p>\n

Martinez did not respond to follow-up questions about what Orlando Economic Partnership asked Delgado and what Delgado told them.<\/p>\n

Martinez has declined to say how much Delgado gave the Orlando Economic Partnership.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey requested to be at our \u2018champions\u2019 membership level. Once they joined, they were inactive. No one from Goliath joined our Board of Directors and this year we made the decision not to re-engage with them,\u201d she said in a statement last month.<\/p>\n

Running the Orlando cryptocurrency firm, Delgado used his reputation as a philanthropist and his affiliations with major organizations to lure in victims to be his investors, according to a federal complaint in U.S. District Court. He promised them guaranteed returns and then spent their money to fund an extravagant lifestyle, buying expensive cars and real estate, according to the federal court records.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Five months before Christopher Delgado was arrested over allegations he was running a $328 million Ponzi scheme, the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":199931,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[80200,92424,80201,81143,139,81145,141,140,24818,92425],"class_list":["post-199930","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-orlando","tag-christopher-delgado","tag-danny-de-hek","tag-goliath-ventures","tag-laureen-martinez","tag-orlando","tag-orlando-economic-partnership","tag-orlando-headlines","tag-orlando-news","tag-ponzi-scheme","tag-tim-giuliani"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199930","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=199930"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199930\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/199931"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=199930"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=199930"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=199930"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}