Infomercial Guru - Or Charlatan?

During the course of researching for our real estate investing "guru" review website, a variety of "red flags" popped up when researching Armando Montelongo.  Here are just a few of the things we feel are "sneaky" and shady, to say the least:

1) He has formulated many websites, each with its own domain, in an effort to push all the review sites off the first two pages of Google. He wants no one to warn people of the Armando Montelongo scam, as many are calling it

2) Some of the sites he has created are bogus "scam" sites, such as the one listed as Armando Montelongo Live Review - WARNING SCAM - HubPages. This page, luring people in to find out about the Armando Montelongo Scam, actually brings up a page that tells how GREAT he is. We suspect the page was written by his own people, but made to look like it was written by a happy customer. He has more than one of these bogus pages

3) The Better Business Bureau rates both his companies - Armando Montelongo Worldwide and Armando Montelongo Seminars - with "F" ratings. To try and offset this, he has launched a new "business" called "Armando Montelongo Jr" which, as near as we could ascertain, does not have customers, which means there can be no customer complaints and so he gets an A+ rating for THAT "business". He hopes people searching for info on him at the BBB will simply type in HIS name, instead of the name of one of his businesses.

The BBB adds, "Complaints received by BBB allege that consumers attended a free seminar hosted by this business. Complainants allege, during a free seminar hosted by this business, they are encouraged to attend an additional three-day seminar costing $1,497 and, at times, are offered a tax lien seminar for $795. Consumers who attend the three-day seminar allege they were misled regarding what information or services would be provided. Consumers further express dissatisfaction that the seminar encouraged them to purchase additional real estate investment education packages starting at $12,000 and/or they were dissatisfied with the education received."

4) Through some legal firm he tried to force our webhost to take down our site, claiming copyright infringement. But since nothing in our site was created by him or his people, his attempt failed. Pretty shady to claim copyright infringement when all the material on our site is copyrighted by US.

Mr. Montelongo is not the only "guru" to use such shady practices - three others (John Beck, John  Alexander and Russ Dalbey) got busted by the FTC, and others (Dean Graziosi and Dave Lindahl, for example) use some of those same tactics.

Of all the "gurus", we found only four that do not use shady tactics, and of those, only three have legitimately good ratings at the BBB (and in our own real estate guru review pages).

So beware, folks! Do your homework before putting your money in someone else's pocket.

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