Last month, in collaboration with the investigative sports podcast Pablo Torre Finds Out, Mother Jones published a months-long investigation into Life Surge, the Christian wealth seminar company that has attracted large crowds with celebrity speakers including college football legend Tim Tebow, NBA icon Magic Johnson, and Red Sox great David Ortiz. We detailed how the company attracts crowds of thousands who pay around $20 to attend its one-day events, which mix a star-studded lineup with worship music, tearful and heartfelt Christian testimony, and demonstrations of the company’s proprietary stock-market and real-estate investment strategies. Attendees are given the opportunity to sign up for three-day “impact classes,” where, they are told, they will learn more investment tips—so that they can improve their own finances as well as make a Christian “kingdom impact.” At those classes, which now cost about $97, former attendees reported salespeople invoking Christian faith to sell them a program called SurgeU, investment education packages ranging from $10,000-$40,000.

After paying for the SurgeU classes through a third-party financing company contracted by Life Surge, some attendees have reported ending up tens of thousands of dollars in debt. As one dissatisfied customer wrote in a complaint to the Federal Trade Commission, “I am so devastated that Christians like Tim Tebow made me trust in something that has taken so much money from me. This is evil, especially because I’m disabled on a limited income.” Karen Neal, a 61-year-old former Life Surge customer, told me that for her, buying into the SurgeU classes was a $15,000 mistake. “I see many of these strong Christian artists and strong Christian people that are up there speaking at the Life Serve conferences,” she said. “And it’s like, do they know what’s happening to some of these people that are getting into this?”