Ep 352 - Real Estate Fraud Rears Its Ugly Head

Hey, everybody. Flip and Danny here, founders of the Freedom Real Estate Group family of companies. And welcome to another episode of our.

Podcast, which is called Freedom through Passive Income.

That's right. And welcome to another episode. Oh, this is a juicy. But I like this one. This one is called Real Estate Fraud. Hair is its ugly head.

Yeah. So I was on Facebook just taking a break from work, and I know that we talked about this. Shouldn't take breaks by. By looking at Facebook, but have it popped on. And I saw a friend of ours posting a couple articles about real estate fraud. And so I wasn't able to read the article of one of them. But the one I did read was a twin house flipper is facing nearly five years in prison for investor fraud scheme. And the article essentially, I'll. I'll let you read it. This is fresh, right? This is December 9th, 2022.

Yep. And when I don't know what it is, there's some things you'll read that you automatically instant, instinctively think that, wow, this guy is such a piece of crap. You know, I can't believe this guy is doing all this. And. And so I'm reading this. Twin city house flipper faces five years in prison. He deserves it. And then it says, Suzanne Griffiths.

She deserves it.

She deserves it. I don't say that very often, but. So she's 46. She's been sentenced to 58 months in prison. And for those of you keeping score at home, that is two months shy of five years.

Yep.

I just think of five years. What happened in the last five years? And oh, man. And then follow followed by two years of supervised release and is ordered to pay. Holy cr moly, that's a lot of cheddar. $1.6 million in restitution for defrauding multiple clients from 2018 to 2020. Yeah, she frequently made misrepresent misrepresentations about the status of real estate projects, failed to take promised action, falsified documents and misappropriated investments.

Yes. Yeah, wow. Is right. So I actually timed this episode to be after yesterday's episode on purpose, because we talked about the fact that the type of investment vehicle you choose is not as important as. And the answer was the team, your team, who you invest with, makes all the difference in the world from your money being lost in the article, because you gave the highlights there. In the article, there was one deal where she borrowed $100,000 from one person and $70,000 from the other person. And my assumption is these are newer investors who don't know how to protect themselves. And one of the things that we do when we have investors on properties is we talk to you about how to protect yourself. Like, we're like the one, don't get, you know, cheated. Don't lose your money. Like, this is about investing with the right people. And don't invest with us until you're comfortable with us. Like, we're very, very adamant about teaching, educating, and making sure that, hey, once you invest with us, then, you know, you're going to have this experience and then you can invest more. Right. Start small. There's lots of things that we do with our clients and investors, and we view them really as partners in deals, even though legally we don't say that because, well, you can't say that if they're not a real partner and, you know, part of an active role in the real estate. But from a mental standpoint, we view them as partners. Right. We're doing this together, we're building together. It's a win, win relationship and we will make sure that you're protected. And we've talked over and over again about we will lose money before we will allow our private lenders to lose money. And we've done it over and over and over again because we don't want something like that. I don't even want somebody saying, you know, Danny came back and renegotiated what she owed me. She said she was going to do this, but then she did this. I don't even want that. I certainly don't want to pay 1.6 million in restitution, have to go to jail for almost five years and just ruin my entire reputation and, and, and down with that. Probably the business falls too, right. It just. So many people are shortsighted. Right. Why would you do something like this for? Let's just say that, you know, she spent that $1.6 million, right? $1.6 million is not worth five years in prison. It's not worth ruining your name. You know, the hard work that it takes you to make way more than $1.6 million that you can be prideful about, that you can know that you helped other people achieve things too. I just don't get it. But, but the point of this podcast really is to go. If you are a private lender, if you are investing with other people, you better vet them and you better know who you're handing your money over to and you better know how you are protected in a transaction. So I'm gonna let you. I could rant about this forever. So I'm gonna let you talk something. Yeah.

You know, they always say, you know, you can spend your whole life building your name.

Yeah.

And one. One small little action. Just destroy it all.

That's right.

But it reminded me of a. When we first got into the turnkey business, you know, what we wanted to do is we wanted to look at the other turnkey companies out there and see what they're doing. How do we do what they're doing but do it better? And. And, like, shortly after we started, there was a turnkey company that the guy was selling all these houses, and the houses didn't exist, you know, or, like, they would sell a house. The house had burned down, and they'd close on the house, and then they kept telling them that they're working on the house or whatever. And then all of these investors decide to start driving by their houses that they own, you know, because they're out of state investors. And so they fly into that town where their house is, and they drive up, and there's no house there. And. And I haven't looked because I had. Had. I hadn't even thought about this. This guy, and forever. So I don't even know what the status is on this. But I do know that when. When this happened, he flew to Portugal to. To take care of his health.

Yeah.

Talk about, you know, again, and just if you think you're bigger than. Than everything get. You know, you're wrong.

Yes.

Gonna come out. You're gonna get caught. You know, it's. It's. Yeah, that's some people, I tell you.

Yeah.

But, you know, here I'm reading about all this. This guy, and I'm like, that's all. We got to be better than that. What?

Yeah. So if you have not listened to episodes where we talk about being a private money lender on a property, and we talk about the process and how you're secured, how you protected, then AJ, if you could add the podcast link in the description on the YouTube screen, wherever, so that people can just click and push over to it if they want to learn all that. We grow into great detail on the phone about this type of thing. Thing, so that. That you know what you're getting and you know how you're protected and what to look for, what questions to ask. We give you our team's phone numbers. There was. There's a video that I did with a. An attorney, our CFO at the time. Actually, he was our CPA at the time. He turned into our cfo, one of our private Money lenders, a custodian who deals with, you know, retirement accounts. And I asked them all the questions that people usually ask me so that people could actually hear. And then I put their names and their phone numbers and everything there going, hey, yeah, you can call these guys. They've been working with us for a very long time, and they know us. And you can ask them every qu. Like, you should have that type of transparency. And the person, the team that matters just so, so, so very much. So if you want to go back to that podcast and listen to it, you're going to hear a lot of great stuff. And then we're actually launching a course in 2023. And part of the goal behind that course is to, again, help educate people how to avoid situations like this. And like I said, yesterday's episode really hit on the biggest thing, and that's, you know, who, who. Who are you investing with? You know, what does their team look like? And then there's a Warren Buffett quote flip that I'm going to let you say, because I loved it and I added it to the bottom of this episode because it's, it's perfect and so true.

I was like, I. I need to remember a Warren Buffett quote. What they're going to. Only the tide goes out. Do you discover who's been swimming naked?

Yes. And this is. I wrote it down because I was following the thread of all the different real estate investors going, this is just sad, you know, and this is what brings fear, you know, into people. And I don't think it should bring. Bring fear. I think it should bring wisdom. Right, of knowing who you're investing with. Right. Of knowing the answers to the questions that we're talking about here. Because, yes, when economies change, when markets change, then the tide wilders start, you know, showing who the real investors are, who are the ones that are going to last, who, who. Who are the ones that know how to get through, you know, a downturn or a different market cycle. And it's not the new investors. It's not the fraudulent investors. Right? You start seeing all those true colors. And, you know, that's a good thing, right? You got to weed them out. So I'm glad that she was caught. I'm glad that she is going to have to pay those investors back because some investors, unfortunately, are not as fortunate. And you and I know somebody local in the Ohio area who has taken a lot of money from a lot of people, and we keep hearing that the hammer's coming down on this person as well. Yeah. And it's not like I want to be there. I've not been watching for the hammer to come down. I'm not that type of person, but I, I have many times. We created this, you know, personal experiences list that gets posted and I'm sorry this is long where but we'll end with this. We created this personal experiences list because we wanted to share. Hey, here's all the people that have cheated us. And if they cheated us, it was because we are in a learning phase and we didn't know how to protect ourselves. They taught us how to protect ourselves better. So thank you. And here I'm going to give you their name so that you don't get cheated and so that you can learn. And this guy is on it. So we're doing our best to try and protect investors and you know, that's all we can do. But you know, hopefully, you know, this person is, you know, brought to justice too. And I hope that his investors get paid back.

That's right. That's right. Exactly. Well, we hope you enjoyed this episode. Make sure you're heading on over to our website Freedom Capital Investments to join the investor club. Make sure you're joining there talking to Ben and or cj. We still got a lot of stuff going on. No matter what time of year it is just happens to be the end of this year. But make sure you're checking us out on all the social medias and we'd like to end all of our episodes with investor Smart Live happy. Bye everybody. Nothing on the show should be considered specific personal or professional advice. Please consult an appropriate tax, legal, real estate, financial or business professional for individualized advice. Opinions and information on the show are not guaranteed. All investment strategies have the potential for profit and loss.

Sam.