For awhile there any negative comments on his YouTube channel were getting scrubbed immediately. It’s a shame YouTube hasn’t taken that channel down yet. I actually reported the channel as a scam because I got sick of seeing his ads. Maybe if more people report the channel it will get taken down.
This is unfolding like the Real Estate version of Fyre Festival or Theranos. In those cases both leaders (Billy MCFarland and Elizabeth Holmes respectively) doubled down on their scams even when it was painfully obvious their jig was up. They both still deny having lied to customers or misleading investors even after they've been proven guilty. A lot of smart people were duped in those two situations too, not just blind consumers but also sophisticated multi millionaire investors, when in retrospect it should have been obvious to everyone that the products were actually vaporware. There are many parallels to these cases and Morris: the schemes relied on a charismatic leader that inspired confidence and got investors to open their checkbooks with little due diligence, the scammers ended up being victims of their early success in that they oversold something and in the end couldn’t deliver. Also instead of admitting it when they should have they tried to sell and cheat their way out.
Regarding the blame game/ not taking responsibility: the problem with these Morris Invest deals began with Morris and the way they were sold by his company, so passing responsibility on to his partners doesn’t work for me. I think it’s safe to say that nobody could have delivered what he was selling in the volume he was selling it, and that’s probably what Oceanpointe will say in their defense. But let’s say he really didn’t know what was happening with his business and was simply set up by his partners; even given that (undeserved) benefit of the doubt, at the very least it was pointed out to CM early on through many, many investor complaints that he was the face of something that wasn’t right. So he knew then, why not stop selling at that point? He chose to keep taking people’s money. There’s also no doubt that he saw in person some of these burned out, economically and functionally obsolete houses he was selling. He knew or should have known they were not worth much, and connived his customers into overpaying for them anyway. He did this through not just his celebrity status, good looks and silver tongue, but also with a well designed and polished high pressure sales program that relied on fear of missing out and classic bait and switch tactics to rush customers into bad decisions without conducting inspections, getting appraisals or any of the usual due diligence. The way it was set up on both the sales end (his side of the biz) and boots on the ground side (Oceanpointe), seems very intentional and makes it hard to see it as anything but fraudulent in its entirety. At a minimum he continued doing business with the same partners well after he knew they were shady. Using his advice, which he was unqualified to give as a novice investor himself, people over-leveraged themselves on their personal residences, borrowed money from friends and family, scrounged up every penny of their life savings, and sent that money to his company in exchange for “financial freedom”, a product that wouldn’t be delivered. That makes him a willing, complicit, central player and perpetrator in a scheme that defrauded people. Whether or not he was the actual mastermind or just a hapless wingman isn’t that important and definitely doesn’t absolve him of guilt. Oceanpointe wouldn't have been able to pull this scam off at this scale without CM's marketing and willingness to continuing the charade when he knew people were being ripped off. He was robbing from Peter to pay Paul running a Ponzi scheme, that doesn’t happen by accident. But what else can he say except either “I’m sorry, lock me up” or “they made me do it”? Of course it's easier to place blame than accept responsibility, but throwing partners under the bus might not work to his advantage ultimately as I expect they are returning the favor by sharing info on him with the authorities now as well. To a scammer everyone is a mark including partners. I don’t have a dog in this fight, my only involvement is I have a friend who bought a Morris house and recommended them to me so I started researching on here and found all this. Now I’m just captivated by the slow motion train wreck it has become. I believe Bernie Madoff was first reported in 1999 and didn’t get busted until late 2008, so I guess these things just move painfully slow and are allowed to continue all the way up until they reach an absolutely egregious tipping point before authorites finally step in. Too bad for anyone caught in the web in the meantime. I think @Jay Hinrichs is right: sociopathic or at least pathological, but I’m no psychologist. It’s just that seeing it unfold on here, the way it was set up from the beginning then the crazy email chain that began after the unintentional cc’ing of all the disgruntled investors... and right at that point in time, when Clayton had to of been getting overwhelmed with calls from worried investors and their lawyers, I tuned in to his channel and he was releasing a video about how to avoid getting sued, with his wife in their living room. It does seem a little sociopathic. My guess is that he just wanted so badly to believe in his own success that he truly felt he deserved it. There had to have been an unhealthy dose of “dog eat dog” in his mentality. I don’t know if that’s sociopathic or pathological or just a millennial thing or what, all that’s beside the point anyway. Whatever happened/is happening over at Morris Invest, it ain’t right.
