I once applied for a waitressing job I had heard about. It was in the intracoastal waterway in North Miami Beach. I had never seen a sign of life at the building and I drove past it at least twice a day. I figured they were going to be opening up. So I’m told to come apply at 3pm. Ask for Whomever. I pull in to the lot, park, open the door and walk in. It is one of the swankiest places I’ve ever seen, but swanky like Goodfellas swanky. There is a bartender behind the bar, the lights are on dim (no windows) and there is this guy sitting at a table. They need a waitress, with discretion. I would work basically on call because they only had “special” customers. I high tailed it out of there. If that place wasn’t mobbed up, I have no idea what place in this entire world would be.
I did actually work for a skeevy Realtor. They would run up long distance charges and switch carriers. They ordered HUGE yellow page ads and never pay for them. I actually set a personal record for keeping someone on hold…7.45 hours. It was a bill collector. No one ever got paid. They had once nice car for clients, but they drove a Pacer. Did I mention the husband weighed about 500lbs? Pacers really weren’t meant for that. I can’t imagine they ever did a legit deal in their lives. The stuff I saw/heard them do…
I was almost a Kirby salesman, but recognized the shady before I actually began sales calls. The owner of the franchise was NOT happy that I insisted on a receipt when I brought back my “familiarize yourself” model that last day. Not happy at all.
When I was in the second grade (circa 1959) I was walking home from school. As I went past the barber shop, the barber gave me an envelope. He told me to take it to the pool hall three blocks away and ask for Lou. Lou would give me a quarter when I gave him the envelope.
In 1959, a quarter was a fortune. I dropped off this envelope a couple of times a week until summer. For awhile, I was the richest kid in the neighborhood.
When I was in college, I worked as a phone solicitor for an insurance company. Their business model was pitching insurance to people who didn’t smoke or drink and were thus low risk. The first clue something was off about these guys was how I found out they got their call lists–they went to churches and swiped the member directories! Then I was watching a training video. They told me to stop watching at a certain point but I was bored and saw the whole thing. One scence was about how if you found yourself in the “wrong type of neighborhood”, how to invent excuses to not see a potential client. Everything about the company had this creepy tone, and I was so awful at telemarketing that I never made any money.
Heh…my Italian grandfather (now long deceased) owned a corner store. My mother remembers as a teenager working there swallowing the numbers list if a cop came in.
When I was a kid in the early seventies, our neighbor across the street used to give us kids a dollar to take thermos’ of special “tea” to various folks around the small town. We trusted Mr. W, after all, his wife was our Girl Scout leader and everything.
What us kids didn’t catch on to was that the “tea” was actually whiskey that he had made in his basement.
It took a raid by law enforcement for us to figure it out. :smack:
During my college years, I worked part time for a month as a telemarketer selling discount coupons, supposedly benefitting a local charity. That one made me feel slimy.
I wonder how common this is? In the neighborhood we used to live in (not realy a “bad” neighborhood, but mostly college kids so lots of parties) there was an ice cream truck that would come around on weekends late at night. They actually did sell ice cream, but it was common knowledge that they also sold party drugs.
I worked for a small-time telemarketing company when I was in college. Their scam was that they sold tickets to fairs put on by “vital forces providers” (like the police, fire dept., etc.). The line I was told was that these events would help put them in the public eye. What I didn’t know at the time was that the telemarketing company would call around to police and fire departments and tell them that they would put on an event for them to get them more in the public eye and that they would not have to do a thing other than show up. We used such names as “The Portage Police Officers Association”.
Things that started making me notice it was a skeevy company:
[ol]
[li]My pay was initially a base rate, plus commission, but when phone sales started to drastically drop, they changed it to just commission. There were some weeks I made less than $25 for the entire week.[/li]
[li]The phone lists they gave us to call included unlisted numbers. I never did get a straight answer from them as to where phone number lists came from.[/li]
[li]We called for more than one “Community organization” and at one point, I heard the owners of the company talking about what they should call the next one that they had just gotten a contract with.[/li][/ol]
Well I’ve sold perfume knock-offs door-to-door for 2 days and I’ve worked for collections departments and collections agencies. Maybe not exactly shady but bad enough. My shadiest “job” though was something I cooked up as a wee 11 year old to get some extra money…
I’d go to the convenience store where my mom worked (1 of 3 jobs she held at the same time. We did’nt have much money you see) and I’d buy a dozen eggs with money from my paper route (I held down 3 routes at one time). I’d then go door-to-door in the neighborhoods with the dozen eggs. At the first house, I’d explain that we (always an obscure “we” implying some group like Cub Scouts or Boy Scouts) were selling 1 egg for 1 dollar to raise money to go to camp. After selling the first egg for 1 dollar it was off to the next house where “we” were collecting eggs for the local food bank and could they please donate 1 egg to help? With a full dozen eggs, it was on to the next house where “we” would sell 1 egg for 1 dollar. Lather. Rinse. Repeat for an afternoon and then I’d return the eggs to the convenience store and get my money back for the eggs.
MeanJoe - Not proud of it per se but damn clever for an 11 year old!
That’s what National Park concessioners are like—nothing but drug fiends and people who are hiding out from the law. Never, never leave valuables unattended in your hotel room or cabin while staying in any National Park, especially the larger ones.
This is hilarious!! MeanJoe is my favorite scammer!
When I was 13 my 16 year old sister took me with her to a Target store (similar to Walmart in business model if your’e not familiar with it) that was doing inventory one blue-law Sunday. They were hiring “anybody” over 16 to work up to 8 hours to assist with inventory.
The shadiness was mine. I lied and told them that I was 18 (I figured if I said I was 16 I’d get called on it. I used the same strategy for a few years to get past bouncers in bars by telling them that I was 23).
They hired me. What we didn’t realize is that they stratified their temporary workforce by age and handed out assignments with the idea of keeping the older employees the longest.
So my sister hired on but was clocked out two hours before I was and had to wait in the car for me and my fatter paycheck to come out of the store.
In 1970, at a local amusement park admission to the park was fifty cents. This got you in the gate with a small ticket, and if you were going to swim in the pool, the ticket was good for a quarter off of the pool entrance fee. Quite a few of the neighborhood kids had summer passes. The guy that ran the gate rounded up a bunch of the kids and would give them a dime for each clean ticket they brought him, which he would resell for the fifty cents.
The guy that ran the mini golf range found out that there was a five pointed cog that tripped the machine that counted the people leaving. One night he managed to snap one of the points off and was pocketing twenty percent of the take.
Most of the workers at that place had some sort of scam going. It amazed me that the place managed to stay in business as long as they did.
I worked for a savings and loan during the 80s. It went belly-up, and most of the executive officers went to Club Fed. One of the guys I worked a lot with in the audit department also spent some time as a guest of the state.
I feel like such a straight arrow compared with you Ten Most Wanted types…
Oh geez, if this stuff counts, I spent two years working for what was, at the time (not sure if it’s still true) the largest subprime mortgage lender in the US. It was definitely shady. I didn’t work on the sales side, but I we all worked together in the same cubicle farm and I could hear them sell their loans. What a load of horseshit that was.
Not shady per se, but the line of business was something considered salacious by some. For a couple of breaks during my sophomore year of college I worked as a ledger clerk for a distributor of second-rate girlie mags. Keep in mind, in those days, it was typical for students just to grab any job to pick up some extra bread, and they weren’t expected to strive for professionally oriented internships.
Some of the girls photographed were hot. But nobody could claim to read Adam, their imitation of Playboy, for the articles! Another of their magazines, Players, was aimed at the black male, and the tagline was “For he who is.” (Players, get it?) Made my purist grammarian soul knot up every time I saw that, it did.
The office was in a little building in the Fairfax District, and my co-workers were as nice a bunch as you’d ever care to meet. A friend of the family got me the job, and both he and his wife worked there. I think their daughter might have worked there for a while as well. Truly a family business!
