This Is Not The Way To Get On T.V.
Everyone knows the old saying “If it sounds to good to be true, it isn’t!” Or how about P.T. Barnams “There’s a sucker born every minute.” A couple of years ago I read an add to lease a piece of Upper Peninsula property totaling 8000 acres. It was located in the Huron Mountains, and was home to the famous Hartford buck! (whatever that was) The rock bottom price of $99.00 included a camping area, a lodge for all to use, fabulous deer and bear hunting, streams loaded with trout, 4-wheeler trails, and year around access. This add ran in several major newspapers, and also the Michigan Outdoors Magazine. There were limited openings, so you had to act fast. It didn’t take me long to send in my check, and I couldn’t wait to see my little-bit-of-heaven around Gwinn.
What a joke! The guy running this scam was a convicted felon, and he sucked in thousands of people, and 10’s of thousands of dollars. He actually only owned a couple hundred acres that joined Mead Paper Company lands-therefore the 8000 acres! There was no camping area, and the lodge was a 16 foot trailer that had been abandoned for many years. The gate had a huge lock on it when I arrived, and the only way to check it out was to cross the neighbors property. Needless to say the other landowners in the area were up in arms over this crook, and they were screaming to hi-heaven. The Huron Mountains were about 80 miles north of this area, and the Hartford buck was from an insurance commercial!
I just wrote it off as a live-and-learn experience, and kept pretty tight-lipped about the whole scenario. That is until Channel 2 news called me to see if I would give them an interview for their “Hall Of Shame.” Several people who had been swindled had called Channel 2, and somehow they got my name. They hunted the crook down, after they took a little trip, with camera’s rolling, to report on “paradise!” They didn’t get much of an interview with the flim-flam-man, but they quickly nominated him into their “Hall Of Shame.” So that’s how I ended up on T.V. doing my 2-1/2 minutes of fame. Oh by the way, my wife said “I told you so!” Why does she have to be right all the time?
Mike
August 28th, 2007 at 12:55 pm
Boy, don’t you hate when the wife is right all the time? I’m constantly amazed at how they do that.
Anyway, beware the land scam. There’s a similar thing going on around central California right now, but the operator is technically legal, so nothing can be done but to spread the word.