Joint Venture Fraud Alert + Advise requested

[Moshe Levy]

I entered into a Joint Venture with Ron Sharrod, Amy Sharrod (since divorced) + Don Jensen + Esther Jensen From Sacramento. The numbers looked good. 440K purchase price, 200K rehab for a 900K ARV. 6 months turnaround. Don Brought the deal to me and 2 others in as gap funders. He was a Mentor at the time working for Nick Vertucci RE academy that I had just attended (please don't judge - if I knew then what I know now, I would not have attended - I do not need to be told what a mistake that was, I now know).

The 3 Gap funders invested 195K and I later found the crooks also took out equity of 200K.  There were supposed to rehab the property and sell for about a 40% profit.  Instead they strung us along for two years and finally the property was short sold by the money lender and the four of them of them got off without a scratch.  There was very little done to the property, they stopped paying the tax, payments to the lender and kept the majority of money by my calculations (about 320K). Then came up with a BS story, that they lost our investment to another company they were trying to get a business loan from (to pay us all back).  They are called Creative Capital Funding.  It has been several years and I want some form of reconciliation.  The three of us have hired an attorney who tried to go the class action route vs. Vertucci first & wasted a lot of our time in doing so).  We are now waiting for our day in court,  There are several charges we are going after them.   

My lawyer is not confident that we will get a cent.  I am determined to make them pay monetarily + criminally.  So my post is twofold.  1) Do not ever engage in any business dealings with these people.  They are all scammers and liars.  They apparently have a list a mile long of people they have scammed, even those in their own LDS church whom which they straight stole money from (no property involved, just a money grab with a promise of the previously mentioned loan from CCP).  2)  My lawyer is telling us not to get our hopes up on getting any money from them.  I understand, not getting your hopes up, but these people are criminals, is it really that easy to get away with fraud of this magnitude?

The complaint has been filed and I am awaiting my day in court,  In which my lawyer is hoping to get a default judgement.  Does anyone have any experience with this?  Do you have a lawyer that would go after them more aggressively?  I guess I am at the point where I could replace my lawyer.  2 out of the 3 gap funders are committed to taking this all the way.  I want these scumbags to pay and I do not care if it takes them the rest of their lives + to be charged criminally.   

Obviously there are a lot of details I have left out, but suffice it to say, they lied to us the entire time, one delay after the other, and used their status as mentors at the NVREA (and our trust in the program) as a cover for their dirty dealings.  I tried to ask for a refund of my tuition from NVREA, (that is a whole different story - they promised to pay our lawyers fees for this and instead, gathered everything I knew & sued these 4 for fraud to protect the NVREA only.  They did not help us at all.   Then kicked me out of the group - presumably so I could not spread the word to others in the group) 

One last thing  if anyone has had any experience like this from the NVREA,  I am not against getting together with others and pursuing a class action.  They have as much admitted they played a role in their failure in this.  Not only was Don Jensen a Mentor of theirs, but they advised all gap funders to send money to the project manager rather than disburse funds to the vendors themselves.  They since changed their manual (to having the gap funders keeping their funds themselves but forgot to contact any of the previous students with the update.)  Their lawyer admitted to me on the phone that he knows they are negligent, but again, not much I can do, Nick wouldn't even pony of for a refund.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.