Real Estate Celebrities Promoted It. The FTC Says Consumers Lost Thousands 'Flipping' Houses That Weren't Real Deals

The Federal Trade Commission sent more than $10 million in refunds to consumers who paid for a real estate investment training program that allegedly made empty promises about earning big profits "flipping" houses, resolving a case the agency and the Utah Division of Consumer Protection first filed in November 2019.DOCUMENTED

The FTC and Utah's Division of Consumer Protection had sued Response Marketing Group, LLC, alleging that the company, its affiliates Nudge, LLC and BuyPD, LLC, and its principals used false promises to sell consumers a series of expensive real estate investment training programs.DOCUMENTED

Celebrity endorsements and buried complaints

The FTC later named two real estate celebrities as additional defendants in the case: Scott Yancey, star of the home-flipping television show "Flipping Vegas," and Dean R. Graziosi, author of "Millionaire Success Habits."DOCUMENTED According to the amended complaint, Yancey and Graziosi promoted Response Marketing's training programs and were involved in efforts to bury online customer complaints stating the company had failed to deliver on its promises or was an outright scam.DOCUMENTED

Response Marketing sold its training under a variety of brand names, including Affluence Edu, Cash Flow Edu, Flip for Life, OnWealth, Renovate to Rent, and Visionary Events, with the company's predecessor having begun selling real estate investment training packages as early as the 2010s.DOCUMENTED

What the underlying complaint alleged

According to the FTC's initial 2019 complaint, Utah-based Nudge marketed its training through real estate celebrities who promised to reveal strategies for making "amazing profits" at seminars included in the training packages.DOCUMENTED Advanced training pitched by Nudge included access to so-called "Buying Summits" or "Investor Expos," at which consumers were promised special access to properties at discounted prices for purchase — but according to the complaint, defendants typically sold or brokered those properties to consumers at inflated prices instead.DOCUMENTED

Terms of the settlement

Response Marketing's principals — Brandon B. Lewis, Ryan C. Poelman, Phillip W. Smith, and Shawn L. Finnegan — along with the company's president, Clint R. Sanderson, agreed to a settlement permanently banning them and their companies from selling "wealth creation" products and services anywhere in the country.DOCUMENTED The settlement required the defendants to pay $15 million, used to provide refunds to consumers, in addition to the $1.7 million already secured from Yancey and Graziosi through the litigation.DOCUMENTED The FTC ultimately distributed payments to 4,670 consumers.DOCUMENTED

Consumers were promised special access to discounted investment properties at "Buying Summits." According to the complaint, they were typically sold those same properties at inflated prices instead.

Officials' statements

"Today's order against Response Marketing and its owners permanently bans them from the wealth creation business and returns $15 million to consumers, on top of the $1.7 million already secured through this litigation," said Samuel Levine, then-Director of the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection.DOCUMENTED Utah Department of Commerce Executive Director Margaret Busse called it "the largest consumer protection division settlement in Utah's history," holding Nudge and its affiliates accountable for what she described as serious financial harm to consumers nationwide.DOCUMENTED

Why celebrity endorsements complicate enforcement

The involvement of recognizable television and publishing personalities in marketing a business-opportunity scheme adds a layer of perceived legitimacy that a purely anonymous telemarketing operation would lack, since consumers may reasonably assume a celebrity would not lend their name to an outright scam.REVIEWED The FTC's decision to add Yancey and Graziosi as defendants — rather than treating them merely as paid promotional talent uninvolved in the underlying deception — reflects the agency's position that endorsers who take an active role in suppressing negative consumer feedback bear responsibility alongside the company whose product they're promoting, not just the company itself.REVIEWED

The nearly five-year span between the case's initial 2019 filing and the March 2024 refund distribution illustrates a pattern common across large FTC consumer-redress efforts: identifying and locating thousands of eligible consumers, verifying claims, and coordinating a refund administrator's distribution process all take considerable time even after a settlement's monetary terms have been finalized. The FTC noted that the $15 million judgment, combined with the earlier $1.7 million secured from the celebrity endorsers, formed the pool from which the eventual 4,670 individual consumer payments were drawn.REVIEWED

For consumers considering any real estate investment training program today, the case underscores a specific warning sign worth treating seriously: an offer of exclusive access to below-market properties at an in-person "summit" or "expo" is a structure that inherently limits a buyer's ability to independently verify a property's actual value before committing to purchase, since the entire pitch depends on trusting the seminar organizer's representation of the deal rather than conducting the ordinary due diligence a buyer would perform on the open market.REVIEWED

The multiple brand names Response Marketing used to sell substantially similar training packages — Affluence Edu, Cash Flow Edu, Flip for Life, OnWealth, Renovate to Rent, Visionary Events — mirror a pattern common across other business-opportunity cases the FTC has pursued, in which a single underlying company markets its offering under several different names to reach different segments of prospective customers, or to distance a new marketing push from any negative associations attached to an earlier brand.REVIEWED

Consumers who paid for Response Marketing, Nudge, or BuyPD training programs and have not yet received a refund can check the FTC's refund program listings for this case directly, and should be wary of any unsolicited contact claiming to expedite a refund in exchange for a fee, since the FTC's own refund process never requires payment or account information to release money owed to eligible consumers.REVIEWED

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