Beware of Real Estate Seminars & Scams
The growth of the United States real estate market has prompted an intense interest in investment, garnering myriad resources for the potential buyer. Many of these publications are useful, but like any other lucrative industry, the real estate market has drawn many opportunistic deviants who seek profit by exploiting its wider potential for their own selfish agendas. In the real estate industry, these scammers often take the form of seminar speakers who sell their lecture materials as books and cassettes.
By putting up an altruistic front, these con artists capitalize on the exploitation of the American Dream of rags to riches success while defrauding countless hopefuls of the money they earned without a get-rich-quick scheme. Below, we offer a guide to avoiding these ruthless charlatans who will stop at nothing to earn money through only the most dishonest means.
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Like any other inauthentic person, the investment real estate scammer is driven solely by image and the pursuit of fame and fortune. Beware of seminar speakers who constantly claim extravagant lifestyles (quite often fabricated and filled with rented luxuries), use excessively boastful diction, and cite easily obtainable certifications as venerable awards of merit. They frequently assume self-aggrandizing, catchy pseudonyms reminiscent of the showmen of the WWF and use screen names when advertising services online, reluctant to reveal their true identity.
Company names are equally susceptible to such dishonest perversion with several scam companies using titles that denote an official government agency or non-profit, when these organizations are anything but. Prone to lecturing like overzealous motivational speakers, these scammers will refer to dissidents in idiotic support group jargon like “negative thinkers” and “dream busters,” criticizing those who practice free-thinking as oppressors of the optimistic (who are actually the innocent being brainwashed by false promises of wealth and success).
Quite often, these con artists will speak like politicians or allege integrity by professing allegiance to a certain religious ideology and citing passages from religious doctrines from thousands of years ago that they claim mirror their real estate investment practices.
These scam artists distort everything possible to their advantage to promote a bogus agenda, including the thin materials presented as genuine learning tools. The scammer’s resources lack substance and often produce overly expensive books filled with useless information only included to take up space inside the impeccably designed covers that, just like the writer, replace quality with meaningless aesthetic. Titles will often be inaccurate, just attractive catchphrases that have little or nothing to do with the content, or lack thereof, found on the pages. And several scammers fill their publications with repetitive supplemental materials like audiocassettes or CDs that serve no purpose but to increase the price of the package.
Their websites are similarly devoid of real substance, and often feature white-on-white (or similarly invisible) content on their pages in order to hoodwink search engines into granting falsely deserved rankings. Used for promoting dubious “Get Rich Quick” schemes, these sites and publications are generally filled with ludicrous stories of success by using the proposed methods, but often conveniently omit the full names of the victors.
And there are never any downsides, no stories of failures or losses, forging an illusion of perfection, a premise of 100% guaranteed success that is, in fact, impossible. This is often due to the fact that the fraudulent writers only address the buying part of real estate investment, neglecting the essential phases of owning, managing, renting, and selling the property just as they conveniently exclude any other information that does not fit perfectly into their selfish agenda.
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So, as we have seen thus far, exploiting sanctified biblical texts and the American Dream is not below these unscrupulous grifters, making it no surprise that they tend to preach a completely fabricated path to success. Often they will nullify the importance of education to emphasize how everyone can succeed. Appealing to the undereducated, the speaker will explain that they were right in dropping out, that the commonly accepted means of education impair success, and that he—not the thousands of colleges, universities, and trade schools throughout the nation—holds the Holy Grail of everlasting success.
As bizarre as these claims may seem, people are prone to believing what they want to hear, that they were correct, that their narcissistic battle against society was not in vain. Generally the same sort that buys Lotto tickets daily, these folks want to believe that for very little money down (another unrealistic practice the real estate swindler tends to promote), they can make a huge profit very quickly with very little effort.
Similarly, the scammers will promote the belief that real estate investment is a good idea for everyone, when this is obviously not the case. Only a small percentage of the population are cut out to be morticians, Mohel, or professional bobsledders, and the same holds true for landlords. Therefore, real estate seminar organizers should only advertise their services in specialized networks. Those who use infomercials or any mass media techniques operate under the guise that you can turn anyone to a successful real estate investor, thus conning people into paying for a service that will, of course, do nothing of the sort.
Beware of attending seminars that charge exorbitant amounts of money, require you to sign a contract, and/ or automatically debit your account. Once you have paid for a fraudulent service, the scammers will continue to attempt to sell their gullible investors more expensive products and services that provide as little aid or information as the initial purchase.
