Worst. Scam. Ever.

A few weeks back I told you all about my run-ins with crooked multi-level marketing schemes, or MLMs as they are often called. I also mentioned the worst of these, the “Travel Agent” scam, in my post You Can’t Be Serious. In my opinion, the “Travel Agent” scam would have been bad enough without the multi-level aspect, and in fact even the guys who were trying to con us into giving them our money in order to become fake travel agents were barely pushing the angle of bringing in other people. Possibly this was because real travel agents don’t work in a pyramid structure (think Amway) and they were pushing our Suspension of Disbelief as it was; I recall noticing that the cut we would get by actually sending in travel bookings was so small that the pitchman we met was focusing on the “special secret industry discounts” aspect and trying to convince us that we’d save more on our own travel than the scam would cost us. But, as I indicated in that post, the “Travel Agent” scam wasn’t actually the worst I ever encountered…

That story begins with another blind ad in the paper, and another voyage – this time to a business park near Orange County’s John Wayne Airport – to try out for an alleged job. To those of you who are muttering that I seem to have done this a lot, keep in mind that between 1989 and 2001 I lost eight (8) different jobs in merger situations, had to look for work nine (9) different times, and only have a few of these stories to tell. This particular case begins much the same way the “Travel Agent” scam did, with a group “interview” with a dozen or so of us in a board room with as many representatives of the company. After the “Travel Agent” fiasco, I would probably have just walked right out on this one, but I’d driven for an hour to get there and (more to the point) arrived late. Sincere there was no way to escape without causing a huge scene, I stayed for the pitch. I’m glad now that I did, because this one was something else…

The company was calling itself “Millennium Centers,” and its basic concept was that they were going to build business development centers all over the United States, each of which would offer every conceivable service that a new start-up business could possibly want. If you needed a realtor to rent you an office, an ad agency to design your marketing campaign, a copy center to make your copies, a notary to witness your documents, an attorney to write your contracts, an insurance agent to sell you liability or group health insurance, or any one of a hundred other professionals, they’d all be located in the Millennium Center. Existing businesses could get all of the services they needed in a single stop, and people who wanted to start a new business could come to the center with nothing more than a business concept and some cash (lots and lots of cash!) and get everything taken care of for them…

While it would be tedious to enumerate all of the issues that would come up if you tried to house all of those services under one roof (and generate enough work to keep all of them solvent), for my money the really outlandish aspect of the Millennium Centers business model was that they weren’t just going to rent space in existing industrial parks or office buildings (many of which were standing vacant at the time); they were going to build their own, free-standing Millennium Center buildings, which would be glass-and-steel pyramids (think of pictures you might have seen of the Luxor Hotel in Las Vegas), complete with pyramid-shaped fountains out front and pyramid-shaped topiaries planted all around the building and pyramid-shaped street lights out by the sidewalks, and so on. It looked like something that Walt Disney might have come up with for an Egyptian-themed attraction at a theme park assuming that he’d been up really late the night before suffering from food poisoning. I was trying very hard not to laugh by the time we got to the end of their video presentation, and trying to think of a tactful way of escaping from the office (getting something I’d left in the car might have worked). But little did I know that the most astonishing part of the afternoon was yet to come…

(To Be Continued)