Is Sheikh Khalid Yasin a fraud?

[Nanees]

A friend just put this note up on facebook:

""Sheikh" Khalid Yasin has been operating a fundraising scam internationally for at least ten years.
His method is to a deliver an on-stage presentation for a particular project, demand donations at the events he lectures at, then after a few months and 30 or 40 envelope passing sessions he will drop the idea after collecting tens to hundreds of thousands of pounds/dollars. He prefers multimedia endeavours because people know they require expensive equipment. He is never frequently booked in a single city so he is able to go straight to a new state, country or continent and claim he requires funds for a whole new initiative.

To do this he needs a moderately large array of company names to operate under. His main organisations listed in his official resumes and websites are:
Islamic Information Network Ltd
Islamic Teaching Institute
Islamic Television Trust
Channel Islam
IBC
Purpose Television
Purpose of Life Center/Centre
Purpose of Life Foundation
Purpose of Life Trust*
Purpose Media Group
Islam Today
Challenge Your Soul

None of these are registered companies or charities in the UK or US as Khalid's biogs state. They are fake. You can check these facts yourself using the government websites:
www.charity-commission.gov.uk, wck2.companieshouse.gov.uk, www.irs.gov/app/pub-78/

Being unregistered means you are unregulated and need not report what you do with your money. Working this way is actually illegal in many ways.

Khalid will make enough miniscule moves to convince gullible Muslims that his causes are legitimate. You will see that there is a Purpose TV website that has been running looped promo videos constantly for four years. He sometimes hires offices for very short leases in impressive areas to show people around. He will pay for a new brochure to be designed and printed every now and then to encourage donors. He has claimed many, many "launch date"s during events for Purpose TV all over the world to get people excited about getting their money in. He frequently convinces talented Muslim designers and programmers to offer their services to him for free so that it at least looks like he has some type of team in place.

It's old news that Australian TV broadcast an expose of him in 2005, but the information contained therein is informative and fits in perfectly with the pattern of his crimes. They discovered that he lied about his qualifications, his brochures are fictitious, he has debts and that the buildings he claims to be developing have nothing to do with him.

The way he gets away with it is this; individual donors donate no more than £100 or $100 a time (after Khalid has very aggressively demanded donations), which they will not chase up if they do not see him in their city for three years or so. No TV station or studio or whatever materializes. And this cycle is able to be repeated over and over and over again because simple Muslims believe that the "backbiting rule" protects all crimes in all situations.

One will notice that Yasin does not look for large individual donations from people of standing in the Middle East to set up something in the way of Peace TV or Huda TV. Such a scheme would expose his scam because he would have to be held to account for his business dealings. It is documented that Yasin received Arab funding during the 1980's, but spent the money on a new house in Brownsville, Brooklyn.

He particularly likes to agree an appearance fee with an organiser and then during the weeks leading up to the event to start demanding more money. A well-known South London Imam related an incident to me where Khalid demanded £1000 extra just one hour before his scheduled lecture at Goodge Street Mosque. Berkshire Islamic Information Group are hosting him this coming Sunday and Yasin has already asked for more money at least once from them. He demanded an £1500 before an event I booked him for and those in the dawah event loop will be very, very aware of this procedure from Khalid.

Most of Khalid's DVD's were recorded, mastered and originally distributed by One Islam in Australia. Here's what they have to say about him:
“Khalid Yasin on stage and off stage seem to be two different people. One of the guys here goes as far as naming the one on stage Shaik Khalid and the other one Khalid. Since we dealt with him for a couple of years, we probably have the most information and most recent long term experience. Note, that we are not the only ones that think this way –

-The Australia Islamic College here hired him and they fell out over money/trust. Reportedly, his visa was revoked after AIC complained about him (they were the VISA sponsor.)
-Sh. Yusuf Estes told us of his history in America of cheating people
-Folks in Trinadad have also complained loudly about his tour there – they told us that that had him literally kicked out of the country with police/government help.
-People that have known Khalid for a long time say he has always had a money problem.

We would like to give Khalid the benefit of the doubt by believing he has a psychological problem and needs help – it is too surreal to see such a gifted speaker pull people into Islam and then watch the transformation when money gets involved.

One Islam held some of the biggest and most well attended events and made Khalid Yasin a well known name here. One Islam could fill a room full of 1500 people and send another 300 home. One Islam paid for everything – travel, hotel, venues, publicity, etc. Plus we invested more than $250,000 producing the first 21 lectures with the intention of using the sales money to produce films. The initial arrangement was for Sh. Khalid to be allowed to collect for a tv station and for us to do the rest. The money collected for this was always to launch a station within a year and to give us money to build a film studio. One Islam was so impressed with his lectures and results, they tended to overlook some of the signs. And once One Islam started questioning things, matters got ugly…

1. The name that he collected under seemed to change each tour
ITI
Challenge Your Soul
IBC
Islamic TV Trust

2. The amount of money he collected was approximately $200,000 of public collections, not including private collections over the 2-3 year period. Each year, more would be collected with the same promise to have a station running “this year”. The community here never got a status report on where the money went.

3. We found that he always wanted more and more money, a bigger slice of the pie. He wanted ticket sales, even DVD sales and eventually even wanted the “masters” of all of our DVD recordings. We eventually parted ways since we could not afford to do things for free and needed to recoup the money we invested.

4. One Islam gave a lot of DVD stock to Khalid and invoiced him with the understanding he would pay later. The amount owing continued to go up and up. The value of the DVDs he took at wholesale was eventually more than $100,000…

5. Because our vision is to become a film company and he wanted desperately to have the masters and production rights to his legacy, we offered to sell him the production rights to his lectures and in the end “gave him the right to sell” for 2 years. The stipulation was for him not to sell to our customers. Since then, he has sold to our customers, changed the names/covers of our product and gone beyond the 2 year agreement – e.g. he continues to sell.

The above is not in chronological order, but a summary of the signs pointing to his money problem. We believe brother Khalid has a problem and needs to be brought to account before he damages more lives/people. People need to know that Khalid Yasin is at best a big dreamer who does not handle money well. It is best not to deal with him, but if they enter a relationship, it is better to stick to the dawah only and pay all his expenses. If any business arrangements are made, they should get the contract reviewed and witnessed, publicly, if possible. If Khalid Yasin wants to collect for a television station or cause, get a process in place to document what was collected and ensure a third party can report on how it was spent.” (Dexter Abu Ibrahim, One Islam Productions) [the brother also provided me with the contact details for all of the third parties mentioned]

In February 2008, Khalid Yasin made the statement in the London Muslim Centre, Whitechapel, London in front of an audience of just under 800: "Zakir Naik and Mohammed Ali of Islam Channel and I had a gentleman's agreement to set up a TV station together, they broke the agreement."
Mohammed Ali had this to say of him in 2010: "I have never ever met the man... He called me once to apologise for saying something bad about me after I called the lawyers in."

DO NOT DONATE YOUR MONEY TO ANY OF KHALID YASIN'S CAUSES UNTIL HE CAN ACCOUNT FOR WHERE THE MILLIONS OF POUNDS AND DOLLARS OF FUNDS FOR THESE TV STATIONS, DAWAH CENTRES AND STUDIOS HAVE GONE TO.

If Khalid urges you to give him money to support the website AlWahy then please contact the CEO of that company immediately (CEO@AlWahy.com) as it has been discovered in the last month that the lecturer has been embezzling funds from AlWahy for at least three years now. The CEO saw Khalid as a father figure before these revelations came to light.

Yesterday Copland School in Wembley withdrew permission at the very last minute for The Salaam Project to host Khalid Yasin there. The organisers are claiming that it is solely due to his "extremist" views and a local campaign against his attendance, but I have been in contact with the school and the campaigners and I can confirm that part of the reason they asked for his removal was due to the widespread knowledge of his fraudulent schemes. The non-Muslim public and police are protecting us. Shame on us.

* Purpose of Life Trust is now dissolved, but was registered for just over a year from a Manchester (UK) address very close to the location that he set up his makeshift masjid and madrassa from 2007-2009. This centre became the focus of the blog Salafi Burnout when Khalid was arrested for stealing money from the parents of the madrassa students. The brief registration likely had something to do with this particular scam. No accounts were ever filed."

[UlteriorMotive]

Damn.

I don't know what to make of this. I have heard murmurings of his fraudulent activities a while back. If it is true then I hope he gets dealt with wallahi. But I would hate to vilify a brother of his standing so easily.

[SultanOrder]

I've had the same reservations about him recently too, he started a project to buy over a former jewish building they use to use as a school or something, after he got the lease, and was paying something like 11k a month, and he all kinds of plans of having a daycare, salon, barbershop, etc to collect feels to run it after the lease was done and it was completely baught, all of a sudden I hear he sold the lease to asian muslims who turned it into a school. Now I don't think he is in the city anymore.

[Leila25]

There was fundraising in many mosques and events for his initiative to set up a TV channel in the UK, i think this was before Islam channel was created. Allah knows what the money was used for because it did not go towards what he planned for. His reputation in the UK is not good at the moment.

[AhmedBoqor]

I watch that video trying to defraud him, won't make much of it and I think it's best if we don't judge the man especially if we're not really sure about the information.

[Shirib]

Once he came to a local Islamic store and demanded that the owner pay him for all the DVD's of his lectures.

[Beenaale_No1]

Always suspected him. Some Indian dudes in Coventry told me he's nothing but a leech, cos as Leila said it was something to do with setting up a channel. He did some fund raising in some Mosques and now God knows where that money is.

[Advo]

I never liked him even when it was popular to do so around this area, people talked about him like he was a humble person but I knew he was fake.

viewtopic.php?f=18&t=253862&p=2931534&h ... n#p2931534

[Beenaale_No1]

I met this dude in Sheffield couple of years ago. First thing I noticed about him was he is incredibly short. He made the Asians look tall.

I got up close personal to him and he seemed like a fair minded individual. He didn't say anything negative about the Somali community, nor the Asian communities.

I always suspected him though, and then rumours started about his fraudulent ways.

[DANGIRL]

if he's an ex-convict, most likely he's a fraud.

[Nomand]

i met him once in real life he was ok but i was not really into his speeches i dont like when 90% of the speech is just shouting like an stereotypical black christian preacher. anyway 3 or 4 years ago if someone would have told me that a sheikh is a fraud i would have never believed them but with age comes experience and wisdom and now i would not even be suprised if he is a fraud.

[FAH1223]

i havent watched a lecture of his in a while due to these accusations

[Maxamad87]

Subxanallah I hope this isn't true.

I love his lectures.

[waryaa]

i dont like when 90% of the speech is just shouting like an stereotypical black christian preacher.

Is he African American? I heard (hearsay) there was an African American lecturer who asked Somalis to pay a lot of money minutes before he was supposed to speak @ a Minneapolis convention center Somali Islamic event. Event planners said no and he insulted Somalis calling them dirty and uncivilized. I dont what is true about this.

[Nanees]

One of his wives is Somali