What happened when people bought tickets and showed up for the event?
Thank you
Capt Kirk
Well, I’d guess the sound of crickets…and the shouts of about 500 other outraged suckers, mind you.
They have (had?) a warehouse in Springfield, Illinois, where the merchandise was inspected, sorted, weighted, etc. I worked in that warehouse.
The fellow who owns that company is facing multiple federal charges, not to mention an IRS bill that’s rumored to be in the tens of millions, and hundreds of former employees (my wife among them) are plaintiffs in various pending class-action suits related to wage and labor violations.
The funny thing is, the company keeps plugging along, as if they’re going to continue fleecing people and thumbing its metaphorical nose at the law until the very day its officers and put into orange jumpsuits.
The company actually did put on an event for the one “Police Association”, but as far as I know, they only put on the one event, and it was pretty bad.
Hmmm…
I wonder if it would be the current one where I am told to “make up” packages, without specifying what’s inside (a hair growth company) or one of my previous ones where I was told to DI invoices to cheat the principle
They sold study materials for the Postal Exam so you could do well and get a job with the USPS.
The premise is, all postal employees have to take this exam. True.
You will do better if you study. True.
The main problem is, the exam is given sporadically across the nation. It may be 5 or 9 years before the Dallas or Boston area decides to give an exam and build up their pool to choose from. We didn’t tell callers that. Just that we didn’t know.
Some people claim that the ES promised them a job. I can tell you that anyone claiming that got fired on the spot. They knew they were walking a razor’s edge between truth and fraud, and spent considerable time and effort to prevent anyone from claiming anything that wasn’t true (which would get them in trouble).
There was a money-back guarantee, but the people we dealt with weren’t the sharpest tools in the shed, and were typically unable to jump through the necessary hoops to get a refund.
Conning money out of the dumbest slice of Americans may not be illegal, but it sure was crappy.
Exam Services and their sister companies are out of business, enjoined and fined by the FTC among others.
I worked for America Coming Together, a Democratic 527 that got fined the better part of a million dollars by the FEC for violating campaign finance laws back in 2004:
http://www.fec.gov/press/press2007/20070829act.shtml
Frankly, I loved these guys - great people, and the best summer job I ever had. Still, I don’t think anyone was surprised when the FEC got involved.
I spent a few months selling bulk frozen steak door-to-door. My take-home money was the difference between what I sold the cases for and the price I paid per case from the company. I know for a fact that the meat we sold wasn’t as good as we claimed it was (USDA choice vs. some lesser rating). I’m not a salesman, and I didn’t last very long, but some of my coworkers could unload astonishing quantities on people.
I can’t top any of these stories, but I’ve had my fair share. I worked for one morning for a phone center calling to “raise money” for firefighters. The pay was entirely commission. I called for a couple of hours, got nothing, left for lunch, and never came back.
I also worked for a summer for Sears, at their call center. If you called to schedule some appliance repair, you got me. Needless to say, we were usually scheduling appointments months out into the future, and our real purpose for existing was to prevent angry customers getting ahold of anyone who could actually do anything about it. There’s nothing like telling some elderly lady in Georgia with a broken A/C that she’s going to have to suffer for two months before anyone could come look at it. And to top it off, we had to attempt to sell every caller laundry soap that the repair guy would bring with him.
My nephew was hired to teach English in China. He had no training or background in teaching. Seemed like a scam to me, but he went.
After hospitalization with cholera and a few other incidents, the police showed up demanding to see his visa. It was a tourist visa (supplied by his employers) not a work visa. He was tossed out of the country.
My experience as well, almost word-for-word, except that I got an hourly wage. Firefighters, lunch, never came back, not even for my pay. Mid-90s New Jersey.
Joe
When I worked at Ashland Chemical, one of the top management said they were going to cheat on price controls. If caught, they might not be convicted, it would be a long time before being punished, and the punishment might not be as bad as the gain.
Add, people trust small companies, but it is much easier to get away stuff there. Larger companies are full whistle blowers that won’t be harmed if they report things.
Depends what department and agency.
On the whole, the US government is one of the greatest forces for good in the entire planet… but if you work for the Department of Motor Vehicles, you’ve won the thread, short of someone from Unit 731 or the Waffen SS Death’s Head regiment popping in.
The US government has a Department of Motor Vehicles?
Oh, is THAT what it means? Wow, that’s a completely different mental image.
I read the Captain’s post and translated the term to Hemorrhoid Rage.:eek:
–G???
In college I found a notice of a job on the college bulletin board for selling popcorn. The owner was local, and made his own stainless steel popcorn and hotdog carts. He was constantly fearful of the health department, because he just couldn’t be bothered to dispense condiments in packets or squirt bottles. I don’t know why he didn’t just use the bottles, but he left the bottles open to the flies, and told us to tell any health inspectors that he was gone. I never saw one.
The thing he was really worried about was the IRS. He was making maybe $1K some weeks in cash, in 1991, and wasn’t reporting the vast bulk of it. I got some college buddies jobs with him, but everyone tired of his scrounging paranoia and the driving all over the Los Angeles area, even if he was paying up to $100 a day for unskilled labor. Those were sometimes 10 hour days, and even in 1991 that started to get old. He also issued no tax forms, of course, so we all probably cheated on our taxes because we made more than the maximum to go unreported from one job.
This isn’t as bad as some of the other stories here, but it did get old.
Wow. Even regular popcorn isn’t great for your teeth…
He invented the MTV Movie Award statuette!
A farmaceutical company which, when a drug had been in stock for a while, would repackage it using as the new “production date” the date of repackaging.
That wasn’t its least-ethical practice, but it’s the fastest one to explain. The company also had a lot of procedures which were impossible to comply with and a lot of processes which would have sent any non-pharma company out of business because they’re such horrible money leaks. They’re doing very well, apparently: they just bought yet another company (an American one), leading to starting yet another implementation project for the Big Blue Database. But for some reason and despite offering “the moon, the sun and it all packaged in gold” they can’t find consultants wanting to work for them. Wonder why.