After 40 years running their family-owned pharmacy in Washington, Douglas and Roseanne Morrill made plans to travel the world. They bought points from a timeshare company to do so, which they later realized was a mistake.
Roseanne Morrill, a frequent listener of Christian financial advisor Dave Ramsey’s radio show, later heard him talk about how timeshares were a rip-off. But Ramsey said there was a way out of their timeshare contracts, just one way out: the Timeshare Exit Team, which he said would give them a full refund if it couldn’t get them out of their financial obligations.
They contacted the Bellevue, Washington-based company off Ramsey’s endorsement and were told it’d cost them $40,000 for their services. They paid it.
They never got out of their timeshare contract. And they never got their refund. Ramsey, meanwhile, received millions of dollars from Timeshare Exit Team for endorsing the company on his radio show, podcasts and financial courses, as well as a share of the fees the company received from the customers he referred, according to a recently filed lawsuit first reported on by the Religion News Service.
The Morrills, along with 15 others, are suing Dave Ramsey and his company the Lampo Group (now known as Ramsey Solutions), asking for $150 million over accusations of negligent misrepresentation, unjust enrichment and violation of consumer protection laws. The lawsuit was filed in late April in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington, where the Timeshare Exit Team was located.
Ramsey ‘should have known better’
The plaintiffs, each of whom paid thousands to the Timeshare Exit Team based on Ramsey’s advice, say that Ramsey did or should have known better than to endorse the company. They also say Ramsey’s advertising was deceptive, alleging he failed to disclose that he was receiving compensation for the endorsements and that he misrepresented the advertisements as bona fide advice.
From 2015 to 2021, the Timeshare Exit Team, operating under the name Reed Hein and Associates, paid Ramsey to instruct his listeners to hire Timeshare Exit Team, whom Ramsey called “legal specialists,” for help getting out of timeshare contracts.
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The lawsuit alleges that Ramsey received more than $30 million from the company.
However, Timeshare Exit Team did not terminate its clients timeshare obligations, the lawsuit states. The company often instructed its clients to simply stop paying their timeshare companies or sent clients boiler-plate letters to send to timeshare companies and then negotiate themselves out of their contracts. When the timeshare companies foreclosed on some of those clients, Timeshare Exit Team counted it as a win.
‘Unfair and deceptive’
The lawsuit also states that Ramsey continued advertising the company despite mounting evidence it was defrauding its customers, including several successful lawsuits against the company, letters from listeners and warnings from government agencies.
In May 2019, the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida ruled that Timeshare Exit Team’s practices were unfair and deceptive.
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Washington’s attorney general sued the company in February 2020, alleging that “[v]irtually every aspect” of the company’s operation was deceptive or unfair.
The company also failed to deliver on the 100% money-back guarantee that it advertised and that Ramsey advertised on his shows, according to the lawsuit.
Ramsey Solutions did not respond to a request for comment in time for publication.
Ramsey is also the subject of several other lawsuits filed in recent years. Two former employees of Ramsey Solutions sued the company in federal court in Tennessee alleging discrimination after they said they were fired for disagreements over COVID-19 precautions and for being pregnant and unmarried.