trump
REUTERS/Andy Clark
Donald Trump addresses a ceremony announcing a new hotel and condominium complex in Vancouver, British Columbia June 19, 2013. Trump has put his name to the development to be called the Trump International Hotel & Tower Vancouver and to be built by TA Global Bhd. and the Holborn Group.
New York is suing Trump University for alleged fraud.
Until this weekend, when the suit was announced, most of us were probably unaware that there was such an institution.
But for more than 5,000 Americans, it was a very real organization that NY Attorney General Eric Schneiderman says collectively cost them $40 million.
Here are the best and most cringeworthy allegations from the suit:
  • Instead of Trump actually attending any of the seminars, attendees were often offered the opportunity to instead take a photo next to a life-size cutout.
  • In addition to that, the theme song from Trump's show "The Apprentice" was played at the beginning and end of each seminar.
  • A special database of lenders the "University" purportedly had insider access to was actually just "a list photocopied from an issue of Scotsman Guide, a commercially available magazine," the suit says.
  • Attendees were told there was a toll-free "hotline" featuring instructors taking questions about real estate investing. The complaint says no such line existed, and instructors only made themselves available to individuals who'd signed up for the "elite" version of the seminar — "and often, not even then."
  • But, students were asked to call their credit card companies during breaks in the seminar to ask that their credit limits be raised.
  • The instructors repeated the business' ad claims that they'd been hand-picked by Trump himself, when in fact none of them were. And some of the instructors came to the organization after their own failed real estate investments bankrupted them.
  • The organization comes pretty close to sounding like a pyramid scheme: The "students" would first attend a free seminar enticing them into paying $1,495 for a subsequent three-day seminar where they'd learn "everything they needed to know to start investing." Instructors at the three-day seminar would instead warn they would need to purchase additional programs — ideally the $35,000 "elite" program — or they would not succeed.
  • Trump pocketed more than $5 million despite insinuating he would not profit directly from the organization.
For more than five years, the group allegedly ignored the warnings of  the New York State Education Department to correct its business practices and change its name (of note: state comptroller Thomas DiNapoli just issued a scathing report of that agency).
And Trump U. has still never applied for a license to operate as an educational institution.
Here's the full complaint: