QB Vince Young sues lender for granting loan at 20% interest without his consent - says he’s been defrauded out of 5.5 million
Our old friends Darien Dash and Pro Player Funding strike again. Last time we heard from them they were suing Bryant McKinnie over a so-called “lockout loan” that the OT didn’t repay. Dash won that lawsuit and McKinnie’s wages are currently being garnished.
Now, it’s free agent QB Vince Young who is suing Pro Player Funding along with his former agent and financial advisor for getting funny with his money.
In short, Young is accusing his financial advisor and agent for acquiring a loan in his name that he wasn’t aware of by “falsifying documents” and essentially “impersonating Young.”
[To read the breakdown of Young's claims click Read More]
According to Forbes, Young’s financial advisor had power-of-attorney to make financial decisions on Young’s behalf. Young alleges that the money the two acquired in his name was for their own personal use and that he never saw one red cent of it. Young is suing Pro Player Funding for not confirming that Young, had at least some awareness of the transactions.
This stuck out to me in the complaint:
Young has no recollection of executing the signature pages to any of the ProPlayer Loan agreements—let alone the long, complicated legal documents that were necessary tocomplete the Pro Player Loan transaction. The signature pages to the Pro Player Loandocumentation bearing Young’s alleged signature are each dated May 4, 2011, even though the documents themselves were not finalized and signed off on until May 17, 2011—nearly two weeks after Young supposedly executed such agreements.27.The Pro Player Loan had a maturity date of January 7, 2013, and an interest rateof 20%, which could fluctuate up to 34% in the event of default. Pro Player retained$619,112.26 as prepaid interest on the loan, and, after other disbursements, Young was to receivea total of $1,104,902.54, or 59% of the total loan proceeds.28. Upon closing the Pro Player Loan, almost all of the loan proceeds were immediately transferred over to a PFS-owned account.29.Pro Player took no steps to ensure that Young actually was aware of or authorizedthis loan. That was so despite the fact that, among other things: (i) the onerous terms of the loan, including its very high interest rate, large immediate prepayment of interest (after thatprepayment and the deduction of various expenses only about 59% of the proceeds were beingpaid over to Young); (ii) Young purportedly executed the loan documentation 13 days beforethedocuments themselves are dated; (iii) the signature pages on the loan documents are on separate,unpaginated sheets so there is no assurance that Young was presented with the accurate or complete copies of documents. These were, of course, facts that Pro Player well knew or should have known, since it targeted—or perhaps more accurately victimized—these professional athletes for its predatory lending practices.
Essentially, Young is saying his signature was falsified on the loan documents because not only does he not remember discussing the loan or signing them, there is a discrepancy with the dates. Once the loans were dispersed they went into Young’s financial advisor’s account and not his own. And that documents were manipulated so that signature sheets would be on an individual page. Imagine getting to page 5 of a document and the text stops half way and then page 6 is nothing but a signature page. Text wouldn’t begin again until page 7. I’m just giving you a visual.
In the complaint, Young also accuses Pro Player Funding of contacting his former employer the Buffalo Bills in repeated attempts to collect payment. He mentions the agent and financial advisor — who are listed in a separate lawsuit-as defrauding him out of at least 5.5 million. Vince Young has earned (from salary alone) around 30 million dollars in his career.
I knew that Pro Player Funding wasn’t the kind of company you want to borrow from, but I had no idea that 20% interest would be a suggested interest rate for a loan of that amount. I mean this isn’t a credit card…this is a personal loan presumably for someone who has “assets.”
While we’re on the subject of athletes and possible misappropriations of funds, if you haven’t heard, 18 of Drew Rosenhaus’ clients including Frank Gore, Fred Taylor and Plaxico Burress could have lost as much as 43 million in together in some sort of ill advised bingo business investment in Alabama. Yahoo! reported that Rosenhaus and financial advisor Jeff Rubin have at least 26 mutual clients. The NFLPA is investigating their relationship.
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