 Serin disclosed on a Sacramento news program that he likely would not have been able to qualify for loans under more traditional terms.Despite already being deeply in debt, in late 2006, Serin borrowed $16,000 to purchase a week-long real estate seminar course purporting to teach "creative financing" at Nouveau Riche University (NRU) in Phoenix.Jim Piccolo, the founder of NRU, was later fined a record $6 million in 2011 by the Arizona Corporation Commission for running a fraudulent real estate investment scheme.