I went and applied because it was closeby (customer service) and found it on craigslist.
There were others there, and the man came in and gave a little demonstration of these fire extinguisher products.
We were supposed to be office managers and train people. They told me I could start training the next day. Oh, also I needed to give them a deposit of $165.
Right.
Anyone ever tried to become employed but found it was a scam job?
Well, I went to an interview for a customer service job. I was told that it was a day long interview so they could show us what the job was before anyone made a decision.
I found out it was a day long interview because they took us out trying to sell stuff door to door at businesses. I don’t even remember the crap they had us selling.
I was actually pretty good at it (I figured I may as well participate since he had driven me to Vermont and I had nothing else to do with my day). The guy fully expected me to join up and was shocked when I declined.
I told him that my idea of customer service was sitting in an office, entering orders, filing, and solving problems. NOT bypassing No Solicitation signs and disrupting people hard at work.
The freak tried to take us into an AIDS clinic. So not appropriate.
At nearly all the online job-searching sites I’ve used, I’ve gotten lots of shady offers. In general, the offers seem to fall into one of two categories:
1.) They give you a false job description. The real job is typically something like door-to-door sales.
2.) Basically a scam like you described in the OP. They offer management positions at generic companies but have an “application fee” or the equivalent. When I went and googled the names of the companies, nearly every time I saw threads at various forums, packed with people claiming to have been scammed or nearly-scammed by them.
If it sounds too good to be true, it usually is.
A couple of times, I made an appointment for what I thought was an interview, but turned out to be a pitch to join Amway or one of its subsidiaries. I learned that these places would never come out and say what company the “jobs” were with. And this was before the internet, and certainly before Google.
Yes. I didn’t fall for it once I met them.
Yeah, the jobs where they just say come in for an interview at 1:00 because that’s the only slot left and then you arrive to learn that there are only about 15 other people who showed up for the same interview, and following this you"re promised that you will make 25,000 a year peddling calculators or cheap perfume and you’re forced to take part in cult like cheers where you’re assured that you will be the most successful human who has ever lived, but if you aren’t it just means that you are a total loser.
All I learned from these places was run, don’t walk.
Spent a whole evening with Cutco Cutlery.
“Business Students: Looking for people who can manage a business. This is not cold calling or outside sales. Call for an interview”
So you go in and there are two dozen people there already.
Q: I thought there were no outside sales or cold calling?
A: Absolutely not. You start with people you know, friends and family. When they buy this, I think they are going to start telling their friends about this product. It sells itself.
Q: This doesn’t really seem like managing a business, does it?
A: Are you kidding? You have to manage your sales, you have to make sure the customers are getting products. Once you start expanding your sales, you may need to recruit other people and manage them.
Q: May I borrow that really long knife to slice open my carotid artery?
My wife responded to ad about a year and a half ago for what she thought was going to be a customer service job, only to find out when she got there that they wanted her to sell knives door to door. She told them she didn’t have a car and got out of there as quickly as she could.
I should have known that the “marketing” job was a crock when, in my business suit and carrying my portfolio, a cop stopped me on the way to the interview and said “Sir, I strongly advise you not to go down that street dressed like that”. I ignored his advice and went anyway. They made me wait an hour in the lobby before I discovered, five minutes into the “interview” that it was Amway, at which point I stood up and walked out, very, very pissed off with half a day’s job-hunting wasted.
I looked into a job that was presented as an office-based one for a life insurance company. Turned out to be door-to-door sales.
I applied to be a car salesman at the local Honda dealer. They had an outside firm come in to do training. I’ll have to admit that the training was good. I wish I could remember it now, in case I go car-shopping. (Or I could just read Confessions of a Car Salesman.) But at the end, in order to get your certificate and thus be eligible to be hired by the Honda dealer, you had to fork over about 300 simoleons. That put me off, and my mom died the day before ‘graduation’.
A long long time ago, in a naive mindset far far away, I was in my early 20’s and in between jobs. I applied to a local job hunter service, which charged like $150, but only if I did in fact get a position somewhere. They got me a position with a local rent to own place-but I basically sat around the store all day long, and nobody trained me or even had me lift any boxes or move around any sofas. At the end of the day the manager (not much older than me) politely fired me. I went back to the job hunter agency and complained, but they insisted that I was on the hook for the $150-after all they did get me a job (even if it was only for one day). Only later did I learn that rent-to-owns were a special kind of scam all their own; obviously they and the agency were in cahoots. Expensive but worthwhile lesson.
I don’t have anything really new to say aside from “Me too”.
Advertising was what was told to me, and it was a day of selling Papa Johns coupons door to door. We got kicked out of almost every business (yes, we bugged people at work) we walked in to.
Many many years ago I went to an “interview” only to be in a room with about a hundred people. We took an aptitude test and then they turned down the lights and started a movie. Some retired football player tried to talk us into selling vacuums. I walked out pissed that they had wasted my time.
The worst scam job offer I ran into was this one. Go to the site and it’s a school you live at and work at for no compensation. The work was the class and you paid a tuition too. It was basically a cult compound work house set up to look like a job opportunity in the employment section.
A: No, no, it’s used to slice open the scammer’s carotid.
I also got scammed by cutco. I actually tried doing it, stubbornly thinking "Even if nobody buys anything, I still get 17 bucks for an hour long demonstration, which isn’t bad. I’ll just try and schedule as many demonstrations as possible, clarifying to people that they are under no obligation to buy anything- I get paid either way.
They didn’t get it :mad: They didn’t want to refer people to me because they “felt bad because their friends weren’t interested in buying knives and they wouldn’t want me to walk away empty handed” I tried to tell them that was the whole point. I was just trying to support myself through college, and was being stymed by the supposed mercy of my neighbors :rolleyes: I quit after 3 days.
Another scam that got me was post office training. There was this ad in the Metro paper advertising post office jobs that paid 50k. At the time I was working paycheck to paycheck, living off ramen and ketchup packets so 50k seemed pretty good, especially if it was steady. Turns out the ‘phone interview’ is actually a sales pitch- they sell you this training book for 130 bucks, and the idea is you only have to actually pay if you get the job. If you fail the test or the interview they actually refund your money. So even though it seemed scammy I figured I’d get my money back one way or another.
Except none of the local postoffices were hiring. And the test locations turned out to be over a hundred miles away, for positions I wasn’t interested in (part-time rural mail carrier). I look at it as a 130 lesson in gullibility 
A new scam is where they want you you work at home for an International company, where they send your checks, you deposit them, then wire the funds back. The checks are bogus of course. There are several variations on this scam, and if your resume is on any of the larger services out there, you’ll have likely gotten the scam as a job offer.
Then there are “background check” scams. You’re encouraged to follow up on your “application” by buying your own “background check” occasionally from legit-fee companies selling you your own credit report (I assume the email generates a referral to someone for this service).
Additionally, trade schools will call you, noting that on a recent “job” you “applied” for, you indicated you are not currently a college student and “asked” for them to call you about continuing your education.
Even legit jobs can come across as a bit scammy. One job I applied for through an agency ad, followed up with the agency, met with the client, sat back to wait for a call. A few days later, the ad popped up again, from another agency but with identical wording, but for nearly double the original advertised wage. The “doubled” wage wasn’t in the visible ad, but was in the metadata filed with the ad, so the ad would pop up for users restricting their job searches to keyword ads matching the “doubled” wage range.
Other “call backs” I’ve gotten were for training to sell insurance.
The last was from a series of companies purporting to find me job listings in “my industry” in “my area” if only I clicked the super long obfuscated link in their ad and filled out an application - despite the fact that if I had filled out an application there’d be my information there already.
Other crap I’ve run into - filling out all this “job application” information only to click the last bit and be presented with a screen indicating that job is no longer available, job sites offering me premium accounts that show ads “no one else has” but turn out to be stale ads that are long expired.
And most annoying of all, one job site that emails me using my own name and email address, defeating all of my “send job stuff to that folder” filters.
I answered an ad in the paper for selling vacuum cleaners (Kirby), door to door. Fair enough, they were honest in the ad about what I would be doing. I’ll try it and see if I can sell Kirbies. They promised in the ad “guaranteed $900 (I may be mis-remebering the amount) your first month”. When you got there, you find out that you work entirely on commission, and the “guarantee” requires that you do “x” number of “demonstrations” that first month, which came out to about 6/day @ a 5 day week. Even at a 7 day week, that would have required about a 10 - 12 hour day. Do that many demos, they pay you $900, even if you sell nothing at all. The problem: They had a call section that got you demo appointments, but (they didn’t tell you this part, you had to figure it out for yourself) that would only get you (up to) 4 demo appointments / day, 9 - 5, M - F, no weekends. No guarantee about the 4/day, either, you might only get 2. The rest, you were required to get on your own if you wanted to make the X / month for your first month. The method of proving you did that many in your off-hours was equally problematical. The “guarantee” was, therefore, worthless, but if you were good enough to make 2 sales a week on the appointments they provided, they wouldn’t have had to pay off. Unless you were a sufficient “Go-Getter” to get the required demos (and prove it, by their difficult/nigh-impossible rules), but were too incompetent to actually make sales on those “demos”, they again would not have to pay off.
Since there was no money up front, at least, I did try it for a month. I can’t sell food to a starving Somali. I made 2 (count 'em, 2) sales, and 1 was to my mother. [BTW, Kirbys ARE good machines. Ma gave me the Kirby when she got too old and decrepit to lug it’s weight around. Still works, still a good machine.] My total commission for the month was just barely enough to pay for the gas I used driving my own vehicle to the appointments they gave me. Counting the lunch I needed to buy (or bring with me) to do the entire day’s demo appointments they arranged (given the fact that I would have had to piss off friends and relatives to achieve the “demo goal”, making me as welcome as the proverbial “Whore in Church” cousin at any family reunion), I lost the price of 1 month’s worth of lunches. No actual fraud, but a bullshit “job opportunity”, nonetheless.
I DRESSED UP FRO A JOB INTERVIEW
and found it was a pitch for Synergy multi-level marketing Amway-clone bullshit
I haven’t had a day job in 13 years, and am tired of paying so much for health insurance. I’ve been gearing up to find full-time work so I was looking forward to the interview. They wasted my time, promising the moon.
DON"T FALL FOR ANY MULTI-LEVEL MARKETING CRAP. People don’t want to buy knives, nutritional supplements, cleaning supplies or gift wrap from their friends.