Sam Leccima Flip This House Fraud?
Sam Leccima And The Trouble He Got Into
There's this man who stars in a reality TV show on property flipping and who's the subject of criticisms these days. Surely, his name rings a bell to you. He is Samuel P. Leccima, one of the cast of Flip This House's Season 2 who has been much talked about by people in the real estate world and even those who are realtors. He claimed early in his career of being a reputable businessman and real estate investor and people believed him for he was good.
But when deception is involved, there will always come a time when your secrets will be revealed. And this is what exactly happened to 36-year-old Leccima. All the while televiewers were made to believe they were watching real life situations when Leccima and his team were flipping houses. He was claiming to buy the houses featured on the Flip This House show and renovate them when in truth, he never owned them. If ever repair works were done, it was done very cheaply.
Imagine, just when people are so engrossed watching home flipping reality TV shows to learn from them, here comes a gutsy cast member who plays the make-believe game. Everything Sam Leccima did from buying a distressed house, renovating it to reselling the property and calculating the profits at the end of the show was a big lie. He was even flipping properties without a license.
It was discovered that in most of Leccima's episodes, the people dressed in suits who bought the house on the same day the open house took place with all of them showing the willingness to pay the full price were all actors and not the real buyers. In other words, no home was bought and no profits made therefore no real achievements to speak of. And because of all this acting, it only shows that Leccima is not a credible real estate investor himself.
With these revelations, Sam Leccima has gained so many enemies from his fellow realtors, people he duped and from the people who watch Flip This House including the producers at A&E. Even his personal friends and co-workers have already admitted that this man as well his own company is a fraud. A&E was the big victim here for getting Leccima to the show and now the producers are bearing the brunt of the viewers who blame them for failing to conduct a background check on the guy.
For his part, Leccima said he never claimed to own the houses but did not acknowledge as well that those renovations works done on the homes caught on camera were actually staged. He even said that A&E and Departure Films knew everything he did.
In the end, Leccima had to pay the price for his fraudulent acts. He already did that actually even before he got into the Flip This House show when his license was revoked by the Georgia Real Estate Commission in 2005. Leccima, according to the panel's ruling, does not have a good reputation for honesty, trustworthiness, integrity and competence. A&E has responded too by pulling out reruns of episodes featuring Leccima upon learning of the truth. Samuel Leccima has been arrested for faking the home repair works on the show and claiming to have sold the houses he never bought.
