Business coaches are people that advise and guide business owners and people wanting to start a business in the operating and growing of their businesses. They can be quite helpful, particularly to entrepreneurs. However, scammers posing as business coaches take advantage of trusting business owners by selling worthless services to their unwary victims. Last October I told you that the FTC’s settled charges against the operators of Lurn, an online business coaching seller that made outrageous unfounded claims that people who bought their programs could make large incomes from operating various businesses they touted. Lurn scammed millions of dollars from consumers by falsely promising their victims that they could easily earn huge incomes each month if they bought the business coaching services offered.
Lurn’s false claims about their programs including telling consumers that they could fail 98% of the time and still be able to make $11,453 per month without any evidence to support these claims violated the FTC’s Telemarketing Sales Rule. As a result of a settlement of the charges brought by the FTC against Lurn paid 2.5 million dollars to the FTC to be used for refunds to consumer. Lurn was also required to give notice to anyone who bought any of their programs since May 1, 2019 informing them of the FTC’s action against Lurn. Now the FTC is sending refunds to victims of Lurn’s scam. For more information about the refund program go to the first page of Scamicide.com to the section entitled “FTC Scam Refunds.”
TIPS
Before hiring the services of a business coach, you may want to find out what helpful advice you can get for free through government agencies such as the Small Business Administration. http://www.sba.gov/starting-managing-business
If you do decide to hire a business coach, you should find out if there are any complaints filed against him or her. An easy way to do this is to just do a search engine search in which you look up the person’s name with the words “scam” or “complaint” and see what comes up. Also, be wary of paying up front for the services of business coaches before they provide any services.
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