Is this legit, or are these kids being used?
I didn’t even get far enough to ask what he was selling. I have had this occasionally before, and it’s always a boy about 15 years old. I hate to turn kids away but I just don’t ever buy stuff from or donate to people who come to my door when I’ve never heard of their organization.
Years ago I bought a magazine subscription from someone like this and I never got the magazine.
Good chance that they are actually casing houses for burglary.
Did they ask you about a neighbor, who was not at home?
I mean, both, probably. They probably have a crappy door to door sales job and are actually trying to make some money that they could plausibly spend on college, and the crappy sales employer told them to say it’s to raise money for college because that sounds better?
I worked at Sears and some construction sites to raise money for college, but that wasn’t part of my spiel because I didn’t have to give the hard sell to strangers at Sears.
Oh, come on. There are very few teenage burglars. There is not a good chance of this at all.
Look, around a third of all door-to-door types, salesmen, missionaries, petitions, etc, really are casing the joint.
The web has made Spam cheaper than knocking on doors.
Cite?
They may also be trafficked. Call the police whenever people like this show up.
I’ve seen this scam in two cities where I’ve lived. They are either claiming to raise money for a school trip or for some other thing that sounds legitimate. They are taken on by folks who pay them a percentage of the money they take from gullible people. They fill a van with these folks and drop them off in neighborhoods that look like they are middle class. In mostly white neighborhoods, the “kids” are likely to be black in order to play on white guilt. The whole lie falls apart if you press them with questions.
When I was in elementary school, I did some door-to-door selling and the company that sponsored it was named in order to sound like it was a charitable organization. I didn’t really understand what I was doing then until I was much older, but it was really a company was using an incredibly cheap source of labor that would be willing to go door-to-door for practically nothing, and could possibly tug on the heart strings of those feeling charitable because they didn’t understand the real point of what I was doing and thought they were helping out people in need. At least in the case here, they’re completely honest that it’s for their own personal use. If college was free there would just be some other worthy personal cause to cite instead.
The thing that worries me is the possibility that these kids might be selling, say, a magazine subscription for $30, $10 goes for the subscription, $18 goes to the organizers, and $2 goes to the kid.
Sometimes the subscriptions are sold by teams who travel around the country. Often they sign up sellers with dubious claims that they’ll make good money, but they end up being more like indentured servants. The sellers end up hundreds of miles away trying to make money with the subscriptions and they can’t afford to get back home.
The last time this happened to me, it was a white guy in his 20s who said he was raising money to attend nursing school. He was unkempt, covered in fresh bruises, and had missing teeth. This was also on a weekend evening. He didn’t seem acutely intoxicated, but he might have been.
After I told him I wasn’t interested and closed the door, my cat sat by the door and growled. I’ve never seen her do anything like that before or since.
This “industry” got in the news big time when this happened. Changes have been made, although the fact that most people get their information online has also reduced its usefulness (for want of a better word).
Oh wow, is this still a thing? I highly doubt the magazine people are cruising for burglaries. I remember a college roommate of mine was outside smoking weed with one of those guys one afternoon when I got home and they’d probably had a bit of an afternoon romp in bed earlier.
I know the help me earn points for a scholarship part was a scam. But I figured the magazines were legit and the teens were basically earning beer money during the summer and getting to see the country.
Edit: saw the OP mentioned a 15 year old, the guy i saw was definitely not that young, probably 19-22 ish
Although I do remember selling chocolate bars for elementary school funds or booster stickers for the little league in my local neighborhood, that was many years ago.
Ain’t no grown man walking around begging people for help with college tuition today.
I don’t trust even “will you sign out petition” crowd.
Magazine subscriptions? Google magazine subscription fraud.