A former star of A&E’s most popular show, “Flip this House,” has been accused of investment fraud and of faking all the renovations and home sales on the show. Sam Leccima portrayed a successful real estate investor on the reality series last year, but the truth is that his real estate license was revoked by the Georgia Real Estate Commission in 2005 amid concerns of his poor reputation. People say he took thousands of dollars in investment money from them, up to six figures in one case, and that they haven’t received their money back and think they were cheated.

Leccima often ordered surface-level renovations to homes that were not owned by him, and would call in friends and relatives to portray homeowners and interested buyers. The whole show was faked under Leccima’s watch:

McGee and others say Leccima’s episodes of “Flip This House,” A&E’s most popular show, were elaborate hoaxes. His friends and family were presented as potential homebuyers and “sold” signs were slapped in front of unsold houses. They say the home repairs — the lynchpin of the show — were actually quick or temporary patch jobs designed to look good on camera.

Leccima says he never claimed to own the homes. While not acknowledging his televised renovations were staged, he didn’t deny it and suggested that A&E and Departure Films, the production company that makes the show, knew exactly what he was doing.

“Ask anybody who works in television how a reality show is made and you’ll find that ours was a very typical approach,” Leccima said in a telephone interview…

Dan Ward, an Atlanta-area youth minister, said he told state investigators that Leccima took about $100,000 from him to invest in real estate, but, as far as he knows, Leccima never developed anything with it. He hasn’t received his money back.

McGee said appearing on the TV show made it easier for Leccima to find such investors: “As soon as that first episode aired, he got phone calls from people saying, ‘I love you. Where can I send you some money?’”

A&E has denied any knowledge of the faked episodes and is no longer working with Leccima. They have taken his picture off their website and will not air any reruns of his shows.

While A&E might not know about Leccima’s fraud, the production company surely does. A landscaper says he was hired by them to fake planting and landscaping. Departure Films, the company that does A&E’s video shoots, did not respond to questions by Fox 5 Atlanta, who had an in-depth investigative report on Leccima.

Here’s that investigative report by Fox 5 Atlanta. The audio is bad but you can hear it if it’s turned up loud enough