Worst Scam Part II

When we got to the end of the video presentation about the “Millennium Centers” I was looking for the exits (or the fire stairs, or the escape hatch, or possibly the “eject” button, anything to get out of their office) when the leader of the presentation announced that the next step was personal interviews, and started matching off applicants with members of the staff. There wasn’t any tactful way to beg off, and I did need a job at the time, so I went along with my interviewer to see what came next. In for a penny, in for a pound, right? Besides, there was a certain morbid fascination (like watching a train wreck) about what the interviews would be like…

To my lasting astonishment, it was a real interview. We talked about my last few jobs, and some of the things I had accomplished on each of them. I’d finished my MBA by then, and the Interviewer wanted to know what I’d studied in school, and what I was planning to do with that education in the future. Everything went really well; I’m a reasonably personable individual to begin with, and by then I’d had a lot of practice in giving interviews. It wasn’t until we got to the description of the job being offered that things started to go downhill. You see, the primary job they were looking for was a sales position, selling advertising space in the Millennium Centers Directory; sort of a private telephone book which would give priority to businesses located in the Center, but could be used by anyone else in the area who was willing to pay for the ad space. Needless to say, perhaps, the sales positions were pure commission jobs, without a draw or expense money…

When we got to the close, and the Interviewer asked me what I thought of the sales job “opportunity,” I told him that, frankly, I was over working commission-only jobs. I did a lot of that kind of work when I was younger (this is true, by the way), and after going to all of that trouble to get a Management degree, I really wanted to be a manager. I’d expected that would be the end of the interview, but the Interviewer wasn’t phased in the slightest. He immediately shifted into the description of the General Manager, Operations Manager and Director of Marketing positions that would be the management team for each center, and asked if any of those jobs appealed to me. I said that the Operations Manager job looked right up my alley, particularly if it would eventually lead to promotion to General Manager and a Center of my own to run. To which the Interviewer responded, “Okay, the buy-in for that position requires an investment of $100,000.”

Keep in mind that a buy-in fee is hardly unheard-of; a number of business types do require people to buy into them in exchange for senior positions. Law firms, for example, will generally require some offered a partner’s position to buy into the firm, since they will thereafter become one of the owners of the operation, and gain a share of the firm’s assets (whatever those happen to be). The difference in this case was, the buy-in wasn’t for a partnership share (there was no ownership of any kind involved) – and the job itself paid just $40,000 per year. Not very much, even at the time, and just 40% of what they were asking me to give them up front. Or, in other words, they wanted me to pay them $100,000 for the privilege of being able to work for them at $40,000 per year, with no guarantee that they wouldn’t just fire me after the first week and keep my $100,000…

Now, you might reasonably ask who in the world would be dumb enough to fall for a scam like this. Well, I’m not (I told them I’d have to think about the offer and fled the building before I could fall over laughing), but apparently between 80 and 140 other people were, because a year or so later I saw an article about the Orange County District Attorney’s Office filing charges against the people behind the Millennium Centers, claiming that they had bilked an undisclosed number of people out of somewhere between $8 million and $12 million in return for “management positions” in Centers they’d never had any intention of building, and then fled the country…

Granted, it’s a drop in the bucket compared with outrages like the Madoff case, or some of the other scandals associated with the current economic crisis in this country. And yet, for sheer effrontery; for the bald-faced lies they were telling and the absurdity of the con they were running, I still think this is the worst scam I’ve ever seen in person. That so many people fell for it when there were elements of the scam that a child could have seen through continues to astonish me to this day – and makes the recent events in the financial, insurance and banking sectors seem all too predictable. Because if idiots like this could defraud people out of millions of dollars with a story and a set-up (it’s called a “store” by con artists) this preposterous, what couldn’t a sharp character like Madoff have done? It’s too bad for him that he didn’t take a tip from the people behind the Millennium Centers and just take the money and run while he still could…