The Stars of Flipping Vegas Are Accused of Leading a Shameful Real Estate Scam
You've seen Scott and Amie Yancey on A&E's Flipping Vegas, laughed at their crazy antics, and even gasped at the dramatic home makeovers they somehow manage to pull off in record time and for big profit — so you might be tempted to sign up for one of their real estate seminars. After all, the seminars claim to give you the knowledge you need to make big bucks like they did, and who wouldn't want to live large like the Yanceys, whom we regularly see on their show with flashy cars and designer clothes? The only problem is many unsatisfied customers are calling the Scott Yancey real estate program a scam. Online message boards and YouTube are filled with complaints going back several years and continuing up to current day. So what's the real deal? The evidence seems to suggest that the real estate seminar is a shameful upselling scheme.
It begins with a free preview event for people who "truly want a great chance of becoming wealthy" from the real estate market, even if they have zero experience and no money to invest (they claim to have a way you can "buy bargain properties even with no money"). They entice you to attend this event with offers of free meals and electronics gifts, such as a digital camera or tablet, and their marketing material is covered in images of Scott and Amie authoritatively surrounded by the logos of major news media – but closer inspection reveals that these are not outlets they've appeared on as experts but the places their infomercial has been seen. In a video promoting the event, Scott speaks earnestly into the camera: "Deep down inside you know that it truly has the power to take your life to the next level. And all you need to know is how to do it. Well, for some of you, this very well could be the first step in your path to real estate success."
According to participant reports, this first step actually consists of a tiny bit of basic real estate information and more than three hours of hard selling to get you to dish out about $2,000 for a three-day seminar, at which they'll reveal their valuable information. In his YouTube review, Ruben Ponce describes, "When we got there it was absolutely nothing like how they pitched it." Scott and Amie are nowhere in sight, the meal is reportedly a cheap brown-bag sandwich, and the electronics are shoddy, if existent.
For those who do dish up a couple grand, the three-day seminar is apparently an even bigger disappointment, amounting to one giant motivational talk-slash-hard sell aiming to get you to sign up for the next level of the Scott Yancey program, at which point you'll have access to the truly valuable seminars, classes, mentorships, and funding that you need to become rich. The cost to get rich? A cool $30,000. For this amount of money, you could invest in your first house — or two houses — and start making money rather than hand it over for promises of money-making resources.
Certainly consumers must take responsibility for the unwise decision to hand over the money in the first place, but it's worth noting that the Scott Yancey seminars seem to target the naive and vulnerable. They promise to show you how to find income properties you can flip overnight, and during the seminars, they ask participants to provide all their financial information, from credit lines to 401(k)s, and then their sales teams find ways to leverage every penny possible out of those assets so the participant can pay for the next level of the program. Their marketing material even boasts that they will show you how to get $750,000 of funding with bad credit and, worse, how to clear out your retirement funds to invest in real estate! "Self-Direct IRA/401K: Do you understand how to use your current retirement funds to build wealth in real estate?" their marketing material asks. We'll let you decide for yourself as to whether the Scott Yancey program is a scam, but we can certainly say it's unscrupulous.
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