Utah County Real Estate Investment Scheme
Paul Louis Bouchard who owns Hunters Capital, pleaded guilty to two 2nd degree felony charges for security fraud. He’s been accused of taking $11 million from about 140 investors in a two-year real estate investment scheme.The company promised investors monthly returns of between 3 percent and 4 percent. This happened between July 2005 and May 2007. Hunters Capital never purchased any real estate. It was all pipe dreams. And for that he could spend up to 30 years in prison.
I’m writing about this because I took a financial class this summer. The professor talked about why Utah has so many investment scams. People say that it’s because people are too trusting or other reasons. One reason the professor gave is that people often go off their gut or relationship with a person rather than asking others in the industry. They don’t want to take advice and think they know best. Arrogance and narrow-mindedness at best.
In our world the best thing you can do to protect yourself from fraud is to be educated and gather information from many sources. That’s how I ended up spotting a Craig’s List scam a few weeks ago. It was classic. I didn’t fall for it. However, once when visiting Europe I did fall for a classic scheme that cost a lot of time, some croissants, some chocolate, and a little bit of cash. Later I read a guidebook that perfectly described what had happened. Wish I had read that BEFORE getting the bag stolen.
First stop before investing: see if they are licensed with the securities division. Contact them at 801-530-6600 or see www.securities.utah.gov.
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One Response to “Utah County Real Estate Investment Scheme”
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December 6th, 2007 at 5:45 pm
The funny thing about this is that there is more to the story than what is in the story.
Scheme? Sort of. They make it sound like he took their money and gave them nothing in return, which from what little knowledge I have about it all just isn’t the case.
Watch the news closely. This isn’t the first one of these that will show up. They’re called hard money funds. You give them $100,000 and they pay you 3, 4, sometimes 5 percent a month to use your money to buy real estate.
Yes, $3k, $4k, and even $5k a month to use your money. You do nothing.
Why will more show up? Because it was easy to buy and sell real estate and make oodles of money a year ago before the lending market and the housing market changed. No one complains when they’re making $5k a month to do nothing. $60,000 a year to use your money. And the thing was, it was easy to get that much money when you could build a house in January and refinance it for $150,000 more 6 months later or less. The bank would give you a check for the difference. If you buy a home for $300,000 and then refi six months later for $450,000 and put $100,000 in hard money, you are suddenly paying for your home. Basically, you just leveraged your home to make your house payment plus some extra. “Passive income.”
Never forget that these people gave this man their money.
p.s. i don’t know this guy at all, but I know many, many people who have been involved in similar things at one time in their life or another.