I'm curious if anyone has had a similar experience as this. It's clearly a scam, but the scammer went to great lengths before launching the scam part of the transaction. 

I have been looking for a $55K hard money loan to do a fix and flip. I contacted a lender that posted in a Facebook hard money forum. Everything was going smoothly and seemed to be legit, until I got the final approval notice from the lender stating that they needed me to pay a $980 upfront documentation fee.

I can understand a doc fee if it's disclosed up front and described in the negotiations as points or some other part of the loan, but this lender said nothing about a fee until we got to the final funding phase. He tells me that all we have to do is send him the fee and the funds will be wired back to me.  It seems to me that the Nigerian prince email scams are trending over to hard money now.   

I don't want to list this lender's name or contact info because I don't have solid evidence that this is a scam beyond what I wrote here. Suffice to say that he claims that he is in Yakima, Washington, but his address cannot be found on Google maps and he lists a zip code that does not exist. I pointed this out in my last email to him. He did not respond.