A new lawsuit accuses President Trump, his company and three of his children of using the Trump name to entice vulnerable people to invest in sham business opportunities. 
 
 Filed in federal court in Manhattan on Monday, the lawsuit comes just days before the midterm elections, raising questions about whether its timing is politically motivated. It is being underwritten by a nonprofit whose chairman has been a donor to Democratic candidates. 
 
 The allegations take aim at the heart of Mr. Trump’s personal narrative that he is a successful deal-maker who built a durable business, charging he and his family lent their name to a series of scams. 
 
 The 160-page complaint alleges that Mr. Trump and his family received secret payments from three business entities in exchange for promoting them as legitimate opportunities, when in reality they were get-rich-quick schemes that harmed investors, many of whom were unsophisticated and struggling financially. ||||| The suit accusing President Donald Trump and his children of convincing consumers to invest in get-rich-quick schemes names Trump, Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump, Ivanka Trump and the Trump Corporation as defendants. | Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images Legal Lawsuit accuses Trump family of peddling phony get-rich schemes 
 
 A new lawsuit filed in federal court Monday accuses President Donald Trump and his children of convincing consumers to invest in get-rich-quick schemes, while also accepting “large, secret payments” from the companies they were pitching. 
 
 The complaint landed a week before a congressional midterm election that Trump has called a referendum on his presidency. It was filed on behalf of four unnamed plaintiffs by lawyers Roberta Kaplan and Andrew Celli, both donors to Democrat Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, and is being funded by Tesseract Research Center, a progressive group led by Morris Pearl, a former managing director of investment giant BlackRock. 
 
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 “This case is about four working-class Americans, and thousands more just like them, who were deliberately defrauded by Donald J. Trump, his family, and the corporation that bears their name," the legal filing states. 
 
 A spokesman for Kaplan confirmed Tesseract’s involvement but gave no additional comment. 
 
 The suit names Trump, Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump, Ivanka Trump and the Trump Corporation as defendants. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment, nor did Alan Garten, a lawyer for the president's business. 
 
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 According to the lawsuit, which was first reported by the New York Times, the Trumps were paid to pitch prospective investors on behalf of three companies that they said would likely offer commercial success. "The Message was materially false. The Investments did not — and could not — offer a reasonable probability of success," the lawsuit states. 
 
 In one example, between 2005 and at least 2015, Trump claimed that an investment in a multi-level-marketing company called American Communications Network, or ACN, was “without any of the risks most entrepreneurs have to take” and that its flagship product was doing $500 million in annual sales, even though those claims were false, the lawsuit states. 
 
 At the same time Trump was endorsing ACN, he also secretly received “millions of dollars in secret payments” from the company in the form of speaking fees and appearances, according to the complaint. Trump featured prominently in the company’s magazine and blog and attended at least 14 events in the U.S. and overseas, the lawsuit states. 
 
 “Trump spent years cultivating a brand for himself based on the impression that he was a successful entrepreneur,” the suit claims. “Defendants conducted the affairs of their enterprise as a fraudulent scheme to leverage that brand, and use a series of false and misleading statements and omissions, to ensnare vulnerable consumers.” 
 
 Plaintiffs include the pseudonymous Jane Doe, a hospice caregiver from California who the lawsuit says invested in ACN after seeing clips of Trump praising the company on his reality television show. The complaint says she paid $499 to register with ACN and spent thousands of dollars to attend events and motivational rallies, but she earned a total of $38 after two years. 
 
 The other three plaintiffs saw no return from their investments, according to the complaint. 
 
 Trump and his companies have been accused of fraud in the past. In November 2016, he agreed to pay $25 million to settle lawsuits against Trump University. 
 
 The new case, Jane Doe v. The Trump Corp., was filed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. 
 

– President Trump, his three eldest children, and the Trump Organization defrauded thousands of consumers by persuading them to invest in phony get-rich-quick schemes, according to a new lawsuit. The lawsuit, filed in federal court Monday, accuses Trump and children Donald Jr., Eric, and Ivanka of failing to disclose that they were accepting "large, secret payments" from the entities they were promoting as legitimate business opportunities, the New York Times reports. The four plaintiffs say they invested in telecommunications firm ACN after watching Trump's promotional videos. They say Trump made false claims about the company's chances of success while quietly accepting millions of dollars from it. "This case is about four working-class Americans, and thousands more just like them, who were deliberately defrauded by Donald J. Trump, his family, and the corporation that bears their name," states the lawsuit. The suit accuses the Trumps of leveraging the family brand to make a "series of false and misleading statements and omissions to ensnare vulnerable consumers." The plaintiffs include a hospice caregiver named as "Jane Doe," who says she paid $499 to register with ACN and thousands more to attend company events, but only earned $38 in two years, Politico reports. The lawsuit is being funded by the Tesseract Research Center, whose chairman is Democratic donor Morris Pearl. (Trump paid $25 million to settle Trump University lawsuits.)