Steve Martel Group Innovateurs, martel alliance, martel group steve martel, scam, misleading, misinformation, outdated, ripoff, life savings, Ottawa Ontario

If you’ve been lured into the Steve Martel community with his “honesty” “integrity” promise of “no get rich quick but if you work hard, you’ll get it” ********, then join the club.

Steve Martel’s ripoff website
Steve Martel FB – don’t get fooled

My boyfriend and I joined the martel group about a year ago.  I trusted that steve had integrity because of all the volunteer work that he’s done, but even that had an ulterior motive. He’s just trying to push his image of “good guy” and someone who “wants to help the little guy” to get you to believe in him, which we stupidly did. It was a hefty fee – 45k all in, which was our life savings. Steve made some bold claims that seemed legit at the time but in hindsight just preyed on our fears.

His claim was

1. they had tried and trusted VETTED contacts that would save us money, time and headaches from having to find our own, from realtors to contractors, to property managers – you name it, they “had a contact they’ve used and trust”.  We called all of our coach’s contacts – they were all outdated and we had to find our own who weren’t reliable
2. You can write off the fee as education (bullshit)
3. He and his team will set you up with a special tax efficient corporate structure, exclusive to the martel group, so we would have the most up to date and efficient way of moving money. If you sent his stuff to any accountant or real estate investor, they would just tell you that it’s nothing special and very common and often not the most tax efficient
4. All of his people at the seminars are his friends who seem like they learned from him as students. They aren’t – they’re just giving you a facade that they are
5. ALL of the teachable videos that “you have exclusive access to” are outdated – they constantly reference everything from the recorded year of 2012 – the markets, the strategies, the contacts – everything

When pitching his program to us, Steve personally sat down with us to discuss his program. We were hesitant and told us our total amount we had to spend, which was around 80k including his course fee, and he assured us that this was more than enough to buy, rehab and rent out a cash flowing property and it was done ALL THE TIME.  We specifically told him that we didn’t want to borrow money to do this and if it wasn’t enough we would save up and do it next time but he insisted it was absolutely fine.

We had a coach/mentor we spoke to every couple of weeks and we did everything she told us to- our coach had invested in our market as well as others for the past 5 years or so and had great success so she seemed absolutely legit.  We flew to several markets and met up with various people (all found by us) to investigate and do research. This wasn’t cheap, and on top of the 45k we had to pay.  We aren’t rich people, our funds were quickly depleting and though we had put in 2 offers, they both fell through because of funding.  At this point, the coach tried to get us to borrow more money which we specifically told Steve we did not want to do. However we tried to go that route and ran into all sorts of problems getting anything from credit unions in the states because we weren’t American.

Around 6 months in, after our first failed deal, I told our coach I wanted to ask Steve for a refund because this wasn’t working. She kept pushing us to keep going and that if put more time and effort into it, we would get it and that “we were so close!” With that in mind, we kept pushing but around 10 months when our second deal fell through, I asked her for his email.

I wrote him both an email and a Facebook message but heard nothing

We finally got a response form his secretary to spoke to us on the phone and seemed like she actually wanted to help.  She took down all our complaints (even though he already had them in an email) and said she would get back to us within the week. We got an email from her saying “steve is really close to making a decision” about a week later and a day after that, we got this:

I was outraged and felt helpless. First of all, the email we sent him was about 2 months prior to the course ending so obviously he just doesn’t give a ****.

I want to put our extremely embarrassing story out there so anyone who can read this won’t get scammed. You hear these stories all the time – older people get caught up in this kind of thing and don’t know any better.  But people in their early 30s , who are tech savvy and educated can also get scammed cause that’s where we are.  Again, this is so embarrassing because all the red flags were there in hindsight. I just wanted this to work out so badly that we tuned them out.

We are also in the process of a lawsuit so if you do know anyone who went through the Martel Group, please have them email us at martelscam@gmail.com.  We are also in the process of having this story go on national news so if you’d like to share your story, please get in touch.
Thanks for reading and I hope this will save you or someone you know a lot of money, time and headache.  It frustrates me to no end that scammers like this get away with this because people don’t want to fight it. It will be a long fight, I already anticipate this, but if one of these leeches are off the market, then I feel like we’ve accomplished something.