A judge has ordered Donald Trump and his closed program “Trump University” to reveal their internal playbooks on how to trick consumers into spending as much as much as $36,000 on the fake university. Trump’s attorneys had previous refused to open these books to the public.
Trump immediately attacked the judge by pointing out that the judge “happens to be, we believe, Mexican.”
Whatever you think about Donald Trump running for President, there is no doubt that his Trump University was a major fraud that scammed thousands of people out of their hard earned money. These type of “get-rich” real estate scams are almost always the same: they prey on the elderly, the disabled and in this case, targeted Veterans.
Ignoring the fact that Trump University wasn’t also a University, many people believed that they were attending a series of courses that cost as much as a University, given by Donald J. Trump, businessman.
Instead of a successful real estate billionaire teaching, out of work people hired from places like craigslist were used as “professors.” Far from teachers, let alone real-estate experts. Trump University courses ranged from $1,495 three-day seminars to $35,000 “Gold”-level programs that allowed for personal mentoring, real estate field trips and access to the expertise that made Trump a billionaire.
According to an insider familiar with the lawsuit, the playbook will show how Trump employees were instructed to target, among other things, veterans by having them fill out financial disclosure forms that were made to look like they were asking questions about real estate investments. Instead they were used by supervisors who used it to determine how much money veterans had in their bank, and even how much money they could get from special veteran loans – pressuring veterans in some cases to overextend themselves to pay for useless courses.
According to Time Magazine:
The instructors in the $1,495 course told students to fill out forms detailing their personal assets. The ostensible purpose was so that the instructors could counsel them on the best investments. The real purpose, according to court filings, was to ascertain whether they might be targets for the Elite $34,995 up-sell or for less expensive Silver or Gold up-sells. The instructors told their students to contact their credit card companies during a lunch break in order to get their credit limits raised–not so that they could buy properties, as the script said they were to be told, but so that they could charge the mentorship programs to those credit cards.
