A Cautionary Tale about Wealth Creation Gurus

How long have I been doing this online stuff? Well, since about September 2018.

Earlier that year, in February 2018 we went on a course with a not so well known property guru. We were looking into Property Investment at the time and wanted to get some new tips (or at least my partner did, I just went along in support).

The course was held in Manchester, right next to Old Trafford, the home of Manchester United, and so we got to sample Salford Quays as well for a couple of nights.

At the time I was also writing a different property-focused blog and I documented the ‘crash course’ experience for my readers.

My impression of the course was mixed. Some of it provided some good nuggets of knowledge to use, but there was also some real hard sell focus of the upsell products, including a very expensive ‘Academy’ course, priced in the £12,000 area.

We didn’t take up ‘the Academy’ as we thought it was personally far too expensive and I was very skeptical about it.

Something did not sit right. You know that gut feeling?

I was told that all of the information could be found elsewhere online. I verified that by searching Amazon for property books, and I found much of the material fairly easily. The property guy then went off my radar until the following year. We got on with our projects.

In the meantime, I started my journey with Wealthy Affiliate.

The Death of a student rocked us all

Then, in late 2019 I suddenly started to get comments left on my blog review that I wrote, saying ‘Please, please don’t promote this guy’ and I was hearing some really bad things.

I was doing some digging myself and almost immediately was hit by the news that a guy (Danny Butcher, a soldier from Doncaster) had taken his own life because of the debt he’d gotten into trying to become a property investor.

He had paid out some serious money for training, but was dissatisfied and told them he wanted out. He asked for his money back but didn’t get it.

Sadly the pressure got too much for him and on October 27th 2019 he committed suicide.

It was just 11 weeks after his wedding.

A Facebook group had appeared about a month earlier, and everything was being discussed there. Danny was a founder member of that group (it wasn’t formed to avenge his death, as later claimed by Mr Leeds’ solicitors).

A collection was also started to help his widow and his family. The charity it spawned is still in existence today (The Danny Butcher Foundation), helping veterans who have fallen into difficulties.

I became a member of the Facebook group, mainly to share my own experience of the training i’d taken at the course we’d attended in Salford, and also a further course in May the same year.

At first, I got a bit of a hard ride as some of the members mistakenly interpreted my blog review as a ‘recommendation’ of the company, and that I was promoting the business. I wasn’t, I was just relaying my experience of the courses.

The BBC look at his business practices

The following year, on 20th January 2020, the BBC Inside Out did an investigative documentary about the same property training company.

The BBC had become aware of dozens of people who had said they signed up for Property Investors’ training and now wanted their money back. They also featured the death of Danny Butcher and it’s causes.

Joe Lycett also did a consumer programme (Joe Lycett’s Got Your Back) about the company with Katherine Ryan a few months later in May 2020.

The publicity was not roundly good.

This was Spring 2020 and we were at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. The country was in lockdown and live training courses were impossible after that.

A Solicitors letter arrives

Then in July 2020 from out of the blue, I received a very threatening letter from the guru’s solicitors, telling me to take down my blog review of his training, and making other allegations about me as having posted defamatory things on the Facebook group under an alias (‘Bell Snow’). This was not true. I told them so.

Another letter arrived a week or so later, threatening to report me to Police and giving me 24 hours to comply!

I denied it again and heard nothing else from the solicitors in 2020. I did however get some malicious communications via my blog in October 2020 from a prominent supporter and obtained a crime-number for it.

In late 2020 I had become Covid-weary. I was no longer a member of the Facebook group after a fall-out, and I had deleted all my remaining posts, as is my custom when moving on. I didn’t want any further association as it only seemed to bring a troubled mindset to me. The disruption to normal life was getting me down, pretty much like the rest of the country.

Then in late January 2021, I got another threatening solicitors letter from Ellisons. This time it was a letter before action, telling me that Mr Leeds was going to sue me unless I paid him substantial ‘damages’ and apologised. This was a shock.

A claim for several million pounds is filed at the High Court

The claim against me (and several others selected from the Facebook group, including its admins and moderators) was for several million pounds for defamation and harassment of both the company (Samuel Leeds Limited) and the individual (Samuel Luke Leeds).

In the Particulars of Claim document they also claimed they’d received death threats that they were trying to pin on us. That wasn’t true either, but it was written into the claim against us!

It would have easily been the biggest defamation settlement in British Legal History if it had succeeded (bigger than Depp v. Heard and Rooney v. Vardy)! The figures claimed were ridiculous.

It was filed in the High Court in London (case QB-2021-000067 for anyone who would want to look it up) by Samuel Luke Leeds and his company, Samuel Leeds Limited. We were actually all served jointly (10 defendants) on 5th May 2021, for a claim of multiple millions of pounds, with allegations of us costing the company and him those millions.

Ultimately, he could provide no proof of what he claimed, just vagueness. All the claims they made were non-specific. We asked them to clarify in Part 18 requests and they refused. At a later hearing, the judge told his solicitors that defamation cases don’t work that way.

In my opinion, it was basically a vexatious SLAPP (Strategic Litigation Against Public Participation) case to silence the critics of his business and they wanted to stop the bad publicity about it after the BBC documentary.

They didn’t sue the BBC however, they just picked on the little guys who, in my opinion, they just wanted to crush with an apparent vendetta.

We rapidly signed up with legal representation (Taylor Hampton) because of the threats being made, but we quickly ran out of money and had to defend ourselves as Litigants in Person after that.

Defamation cases are extremely expensive and it is for the defendant to show themselves to be innocent. This is not the same as the Innocent until Proven Guilty system used in Criminal proceedings.

But for a defamation charge to stick, the petitioner must evidence a diminishment to reputation, or serious financial loss. Mr Leeds claimed both. We defended our case based on truth and honest opinion.

We were however completely adrift in a vast ocean of legal jargon and protocols, with legal requests pouring in from the petitioner’s solicitor, who swamped us with thousands of pages of paperwork.

I spent well over 400 logged hours dealing with the paperwork, and probably another 100 on phone calls. I probably spent another couple of hundred hours lying awake at night worrying about it. It was all consuming.

After 3 years, the case is thrown out by a judge

To cut a long story very short, the whole thing rumbled on for another 3 years without them progressing their claim, with unbelievable stress, before we managed to get new legal representation.

Earlier in 2023, at a hearing, the experienced sitting judge told the claimants barrister that the claimants case was “a swamp” that he could not understand, and ordered clarification.

In late 2023 we managed to get two KC barristers to work for us on a no-fee basis. This was what ultimately changed the game, and within a few months, our new legal representation tore his  without-merit case apart, and in March 2024 the case was discontinued against me (before it was struck out by Justice Kerr) and the rest of the case was struck out for the others in May 2024 by Justice Nicklin.

The guru and his company were also ordered to pay all of our legal costs, as well as their own.

It’s estimated that this frivolous, without merit legal action must have cost more than £1 million. We are currently establishing a figure with costs lawyers. However, they are now disputing our time logs, defending the aggro he caused us all.

Even at this late stage, when our costs are being evaluated, his solicitors are still trying to drive the narrative, making continuing accusations and want non-disparaging agreements signed (something that would actually prevent me telling you all this).

I’ve told my solicitors that not even a Gold Pig would get me to sign an NDA. 😏

I’ve learned a whole lot about the civil legal system in this time; how it is totally stacked in favour of those with money to throw around. I’ve learned how easy it is for a rich person to bully others using Civil Law.

It doesn’t matter at the start whether the claims are true or not, being sued means it shuts off the ability to fight back publicly. Our legal costs claimed in total are close to £450,000 now.

We were silenced for 3 years. That is a SLAPP. We eventually won out and will soon be able to tell the World how the legal action taken against us was not even worthy of court time. It was thrown out. It is now recognised as a SLAPP tactic and mentioned as such in Parliament on 21st November 2024.

Mr Leeds and his company had been threatening many who crossed their path with legal action, and he was boasting publicly about it at every opportunity on his YouTube channel, but since the case was thrown out they have been very quiet on the matter.

Strange that.