Emails purportedly from company claim sale of Elvis' house was a scam

Graceland has long been a place of pilgrimage for tourists from around the world wishing to pay tribute to the late Elvis Presley.

But recently, the King's Memphis estate has become less of a pop culture mecca and more of a place of the weird.

An attempted property foreclosure due to a loan allegedly taken out by Lisa Marie Presley from the mysterious company Naussany Investments and Private Lending. A lawsuit filed by Graceland owner Riley Keough claiming the attempted foreclosure was fraud and documents were falsified. And now emails in multiple languages ​​have been sent to various media outlets, claiming to be from the person behind the scam.

“The Tennessee Attorney General's Office has become aware of an email from an individual claiming to be Gregory Naussany who says, in essence, that he is a Nigerian scammer. We will continue to review the issue of the failed seizure attempt of the iconic Graceland, beloved home of Elvis Presley,” Amy Lannom Wilhite, communications director for the Tennessee Attorney General, said in an email Wednesday.

Here is the latest news on the investigation into Naussany, the lawsuit against the entity and the alleged scammer's emails.

What are the next legal steps regarding the attempted seizure of Graceland?

To begin with, the foreclosure was halted after a hearing in Shelby County Chancery Court on May 22. Chancellor JoeDae Jenkins ruled that the pending foreclosure sale could not proceed.

On May 24, Memphis-based law firm Morton & Germany – which represents Keough (the daughter of the late Lisa Marie Presley) and The Promenade Trust – filed the court-ordered injunction following the May 22 hearing . The order halted the foreclosure sale and upholds the restraining order filed by Keough and The Promenade Trust, which controls the Graceland estate, regarding the sale and fraudulent claims in the lawsuit.

Representatives for Morton & Germany told The Commercial Appeal, part of the USA TODAY Network, that no further litigation or hearings are scheduled in the case. That's a result of the May 22 hearing and the arrival of an ongoing investigation in the office of Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti.

On May 23, Skrmetti officially announced that his office would begin investigating a fraud case involving Naussany Investments' claims to Graceland.

Did Naussany Investments Admit That the Graceland Foreclosure Attempt Was a Scam?

There is no shortage of twists and turns in the Graceland foreclosure case and the alleged representatives of Naussany Investments.

The original lawsuit filed by Keough’s legal team names two individuals affiliated with the company: Kurt Naussany and Carolyn Williams. At the start of the May 22 hearing, a Gregory Naussany entered the picture, initially filing a request to postpone the hearing. That request was denied by the court.

After the hearing, the alleged Gregory Naussany sent an email to The Commercial Appeal and called for the foreclosure proceedings to be abandoned. Despite this assertion, the Shelby County Chancery Clerk's Office confirmed that it has not received any correspondence from the company since the hearing concluded on the morning of May 22. As of Wednesday May 29, the court had still not received any correspondence from Naussany Investments.

The email was riddled with grammatical errors, and the alleged Gregory Naussany sent The Commercial Appeal a follow-up email claiming that Kurt Naussany was no longer affiliated with the company and had not been since 2015. Additionally, the emails received from Gregory Naussany came from a Hotmail account.

The other two emails associated with the company are Outlook accounts and are both listed in the lawsuit filed by Morton & Germany. Carolyn Williams' email contained three “L”s instead of the two in “LLC.”

Emails from alleged Naussany Investments associate claim foreclosure was a scam

After Gregory Naussany's appearance, the email associated with Kurt Naussany contacted The Commercial Appeal on May 25. This email from the alleged Kurt Naussany came after a “please do not contact anyone” request from the user.

Kurt Naussany's email to The Commercial Appeal was written in Spanish. Using Google Translate, the email states:

“To all the press, I am the leader of Yahoo Network in Nigeria. I have Google worms in the US, the president is all made up and a hoax, my network preys on the dead and the elderly for money, we make up things by finding things on Intanet to scam American citizens, this is something made up for my worms to make money.

“As you know, we Nigerian Yahoos have been doing this for many years. We steal American birth and death certificates, we hack people’s accounts, we make up addresses, we steal identities, we search everything and hack all sorts of records. We hurt innocent people who don’t know that we took their identity and used the name of innocent people to do it. My alliance has failed in this matter. We have stolen millions from you Americans, you blind fools.

“We move on to the next project and keep drinking. One press threat and we sit back and laugh at you idiots and watch you make fools of yourselves. Come find us in Nigeria.”

In the electronic signature, there is a request to translate the message from Nigerian to English to understand it (it is written in Spanish), as well as the contact details of the Hotmail address associated with Gregory Naussany.

On May 28, The New York Times reported receiving a similar email from Naussany Investments; however, some details differed. The Times reported that the alleged Naussany Investments representative claimed to be a “leader of the network on the dark web” and that the network targeted the elderly and the deceased, “particularly those in Florida and California.”

Additionally, the email received by The Times was written in Luganda, a Bantu language spoken in Uganda, according to the report.

Other media outlets, including the Daily Memphian, reported receiving an email from the same account, though the details of the message differ. The outlet said the message they received was written in English and Ganda (also a Ugandan dialect) and claimed to have “worms in Arizona.”

What will happen next in the Graceland affair?

At this time, no additional hearings are confirmed regarding the foreclosure case. As the Tennessee Attorney General's Office investigates the fraud case, any additional news at this point will likely come from that investigation.

On Tuesday, The Commercial Appeal reached out to the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation about the case. TBI communications director Josh Devine said the TBI has not received a request from the Shelby County District Attorney, which would be the mechanism by which the TBI could open an investigation.

The Shelby County District Attorney General's Office did not respond to our request for comment.

When asked about Shelby County's involvement or the process of partnering with local and state agencies for the investigation, the Tennessee Attorney General's Office provided no additional information or comment.

The Tennessee Attorney General's Office has provided additional consumer safety resources regarding real estate scams.

This article was originally published on Memphis Commercial Appeal: Graceland sale update: Emails claim foreclosure was Nigerian scam