Scams or Legitimate?

[Greg Carr]

I had a meeting with a married couple two days ago, and they told me they joined Phill Grove's program and spent $20,000 on it. Let me reiterate: Twenty thousand dollars! My jaw almost hit the floor.

That's $20,000 you could have actually spent investing. They said they were satisfied with it, and how he sent these videos to them and they have this weekly training online where they can ask him questions. But, seriously, $20,000 is a lot of money on anybody's scale. And apparently they have only $50,000 left.

I have seen a lot of these national programs that roam between major cities giving well-marketed presentations to get people in their marketing funnel. I cannot believe the money that people spend on these things. You can get better training by simply attending local meetups and training programs for either free or $500 or less. Simply meeting a local investor and shadowing them for a bit will teach you a lot more than some training program that costs as much as a college degree.

Here is my question: is this even legal? There has to be something illegal about charging people $20,000 for some real estate guru training program.

Phill Grove also teaches about assigning mortgages to people who cannot qualify for conventional financing and charging absurd assignment fees (like $50k). That sounds like a lawsuit waiting to happen. Anybody want to chime in on this one?

I recently attended Armondo Montelongo's event, and that place was full of the worst salesmen I've ever met. They really didn't even teach anything, they just pitched their $1,500 program (a 3 day event...) as hard as they could. One of their salesmen was an old man who was flat-out disrespectful towards me. Another was a man who started investing in Nevada and actually seemed slightly intelligent, though. The rest had very questionable credibility.

My question is this: obviously, their job is to get as many people to sign up as possible. They surely get a commission off of this. So, if they were investors, why would they be here and not actually out investing?

Nobody communicates it better than this Forbes' writer: http://www.forbes.com/sites/abrambrown/2013/06/26/...

The only millionaires I've seen come out of these programs are the individuals ripping people off for $20,000. A real estate "entrepreneur" is a scam artist extraordinaire.

[Jay Hinrichs]

@Chris K. 

 if would be one thing if it was their life savings many times they teach them how to up their Credit card limits .. so the attendees actually borrow 20k at CC rates and knowing that they will pay the CC of with their first flip.. And of course we all know the mortality rate in RE investing.. 80 to 90% of the folks here on BP will never make any money in RE investing but they go the info for free.. And same with any of the Guru companies that are in the education business.  Some will do good no doubt .. and most will fail and lose what ever they invested.  Same as I said with those on BP  most will get excited .. many will buy yellow letters or bandit signs or other manner of marketing and that will all be for naught as they won't get any calls or if they do they don't know how to handle them .. But there will be a small percent that do well and get fortunate and make deals right off the bat that catapults them to a successful career.