The 80's thread made me remember TOM VU

WET ME SHO YOU DA WAY TO FINANSHO FWEEDOM!!!!

 

Mike Tyson? is that you????
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I remember his corny ads. Even THEN, I always thought.. "what is he trying to sell that the realty industry doesn't already know, and why aren't THEY raking in the millions??"

The entertainment value was there...

"Look at my mansion, I have a fountain in my front yard, I have a fountain inside my house, I have a swimming pool in my back yard and my yacht parked out back, pretty soon, I get tired of looking at water, now I show you how to make millions with my plan"

 

every now and then the turds just will not flush and keep popping to the surface

http://www.thestreet.com/_mktw/stocks/melissadavid/10030240.html

Pre-Paid Legal Services (PPD:NYSE - news - commentary - research - analysis) says it just wrapped up its best recruiting quarter ever, signing on 45,962 new salespeople -- a 71% increase from last year. But new research by TheStreet.com suggests that the company is heavily reliant on a few rainmakers who use controversial hard-sell tactics that several state regulators are scrutinizing.
Pre-Paid, which declined to comment on the specifics of this article, relies on a system of grass-roots customer recruitment and intense recruitment of new recruiters to keep its revenue growing. The problem with that, says Len Clements, a prominent watchdog of the so-called multilevel marketing industry, was apparent at a Pre-Paid recruitment meeting he attended in December 2000.

Clements found himself in a room with Tommy Vu, the 1980s infomercial star widely sued by disgruntled students of his $15,000 real-estate sales "boot camp."

"Tom Vu takes out a five-dollar bill and wraps it around the microphone stand," recalled Clements, who has no financial stake in the company's stock. "Then he asks the audience, 'If I said you could take this $5 for $1 of your own, what would you say?'

"I immediately thought, 'You'd be operating a Ponzi scheme.' But I didn't want to wreck the meeting."

One former Pre-Paid star who said he was victimized by that scheme is Jeff Turnipseed.

Hard Sell

For Turnipseed, selling Pre-Paid policies was never a problem.

He could walk into a company, sign up a crowd and do it consistently enough to rank among Pre-Paid's top salesmen. He recruited almost no one, relying entirely on his own sales for handsome commission checks.

But even Turnipseed couldn't overcome Pre-Paid's dismal customer retention rate -- roughly half the people who get a policy don't renew after one year. He found himself repaying Pre-Paid for the commissions he'd already collected on policies that wound up lapsing early. And his checks began to shrink.

The more policies Turnipseed sold, the more customers canceled early, and the more money he had to return to the company.

"I have spent more than two years talking to scores and scores -- if not hundreds -- of Pre-Paid associates and studying the Pre-Paid scheme," said John Dexter, an Oklahoma City attorney who's filed a class-action lawsuit against Pre-Paid on behalf of Turnipseed and other top earners. "And I have found there is no difference between the honest and successful Pre-Paid associate and the immigrant laborer who goes into debt to the company store."

Pre-Paid declined to respond to direct allegations.

 

from a web page-
Tom Vu ran into legal trouble in the 90s and was briefly jailed. He managed to retire from seminars and now lives in California.

 

The truth of the matter is that many have made millions in realestate, but no one can teach you how to do it. Requires guts, tolerance of risk, a fair amount of money, and luck doesn't hurt... .

It is fun to see all of these commercials to get rich in realestate. Of course they are still on, just with different sponsors. Remember the one with the twin midgets?

What about all of the commercials for losing weight? I have often thought of ponying up the money to develop some cheap-azz product to push on an infomercial. Folks make millions, then dissolve the company."Using this product, along with diet an exercise, and you can lose 20 lbs in one day! (Results not typical)"

What about a rubber ball that you place between your but cheeks and squeeze all day long? Anyone with me here?

Now that you mention it, I think I went to one of his free seminars too. I was shocked how many folks ran to the front of the stage, checks in hand, at the end. He was at our little seminar too. Quite frankly, I think he went to all of them!