Payday loan mogul Scott Tucker’s possessions draw crowd — and money — at estate sale
More than 1,000 people paid a visit to Leawood’s tony Hallbrook neighborhood last month to buy up $85,626 worth of imprisoned payday loan businessman Scott Tucker’s abandoned possessions at an estate sale, according to a recent court filing.
That’s nearly eight times as much as what an official with Brown Button Estate Sale Services, which conducted Tucker’s estate sale on June 28-30, told a television reporter that estate sales normally fetch. More than $40,000 worth of items were sold within the first three hours of the sale.
People bought Tucker’s professional racing memorabilia, furniture, exercise equipment and other property left behind after he was sent to serve a 16-year, eight-month prison sentence and his wife abandoned the house earlier this year. The Internal Revenue Service has since seized the $2 million house that backs up to the Hallbrook Country Club golf course.
Tucker’s house was featured prominently in a Netflix documentary series called Dirty Money, an episode of which explored Tucker’s enterprises and featured interviews and footage inside the house.
After Brown Button gets 35% for commissions and other fees, the Tucker estate sale resulted in $53,629 going to a court-appointed monitor in charge of recovering assets Tucker obtained through money he made running an illegal payday loan operation.
To date, the court-appointed monitor in a lawsuit that the Federal Trade Commission won against the Kansas City payday loan tycoon has recovered $12.3 million that’s meant to be redistributed to consumers of Tucker’s enterprises. The FTC sued Tucker in 2012 and by 2016, a federal judge awarded the FTC a $1.3 billion judgment against Tucker and his businesses.
Tucker was later charged and convicted of running a payday loan business that charged borrowers illegally high interest rates on confusing loan terms. The businesses were nominally set up on American Indian tribal lands as an attempt to extend loans with rates higher than what some states allow, but actually operated largely out of an office building in Overland Park.
