In my last post I wrote about an almost job I had from Craigslist where I could have gotten paid in five cars for designing a website to make a Russian man’s professions look more like real businesses.  I also used to tour the Computer “gigs” section and look for work after my regular job.  I stopped doing this in about 2006 when I got a better paying job with a more chaotic schedule.

Most of the jobs I took were filled with decent people who paid well but just wanted someone to come after regular business hours.  This worked for me since I had a regular job and so did they and it was always a pleasant exchange of services for cash.  The one I began to be wary about was Laptop repair.  In those days most computers were still desktops as laptops tended to still be on the expensive side and people who wanted them repaired were often clumsy people who broke the LCD screen and somehow thought they could find someone to fix it for $25.  They were easy to ignore.  One time I responded to one way down in Sunset Park in Brooklyn.  It was fairly late at night too but from the description I figured I would just have to re-solder the power supply that had likely been knocked loose when someone tripped over the cable.

When I got there it was at some Photography Supply store on the second floor.  I was supposed to meet a man named “Jim” and when I buzzed the place I asked for “Jim” and was buzzed up.

Upstairs there were three Orthodox Jewish men.  Sometimes people take familiar names to use with outsiders and it was clear I was an outsider in this place.  I asked them about the laptop and “Jim” showed it to me.  But…He put down a printed contract in front of me so I could sign it.  It was about two pages long in printed legal paper.  I found this to be very unusual so I read it all the way through, most of it was “blah Blah name of business hereafter referred to as the client blah blah”

Then, finally, “blah blah blah I hereby guarantee that if I am unable to repair this computer that I take full responsibility for causing its un-usability and agree to pay for all damages amounting to (handwritten) $2000.00”

So they wanted to pay me $100 if I fixed the computer but if I failed I had to pay $2000.00.

I said “no”.

Then “Jim” got very hostile.  Very, very hostile actually.  As I got up he and his friend shoved me back down in the chair and he slammed the pen down in front of me and said “Just sign the fucking paper and we will be done with this”.  I forced myself up again and backed away from the table with the laptop and the “legal” document.  “Jim” said again “Sign the fucking paper asshole.  No need to make this tough on you because you are not leaving until you sign the paper”  I let them back me toward the window and then I opened it.  “What are you gonna do pussy?  Jump?” and I told “Jim” that I was going to start yelling that there was a fire to the people below and that I had set it because I am “off my meds” and could they please send help right away before I hurt someone.

“Jim” and his bearded friends scowled and advanced and then paused.  I yelled “Help!” out the window and then suddenly “wait, wait no.  We are just kidding.  We are just teasing you.  Sorry.  didn’t know you would be such a pussy and take this seriously.” and they cut a swath for me and let me out the door.

They were smart enough to know that a little resistance could mean a lot of trouble for them so I let them go.  About two years later I remember reading that one of the photography stores in that area was shut down for bait and switch tactics and threatening customers who canceled their credit card payments, similar to what Vitaly Borker would get sent to prison for doing years later.

I gave up on laptop repairs after that.

Web Design is a tough business. It is so tough that these days I don’t do it at all except as a favor or to make some very quick money doing a routine upgrade or something I find on Craigslist.   But about seven years ago I had a few jobs, which is funny in a way because though I am technically skilled I have no sense of style or taste in web design.  In fact this site only looks like it does because my fiancée told me earlier versions of it were so ugly that someone in some country I was visiting might have a reason to arrest me for creating a public abomination with my face on it.

It looked as if North Korea had designed a promotional poster for a Three Stooges Movie.

In the salad days of 2005 I was in demand as a cheaper alternative to Web Designers who had a sense of style.  This way they could hire a separate graphic designer once I got all the critical things working like the MySQL database and the shopping cart.  The problem was that on Craigslist people wanted to pay nothing for everything.  They wanted me to do work for free so I could “put it on my resume” but I did not want to put most websites on my resume.  Plus most people who actually paid were hired to do the work themselves so I couldn’t put them on my resume, but I did many of them.  I always wanted $500 to $2000 for what would be one week to four weeks part time work.  A bargain really.

One day I got a call from this Russian fellow and he saw I had responded to his ad to design a website for his school and he promised he could pay me well for my work but he wanted to meet me.  So I agreed.

I met him in a bar near Canal St.  He wore cheap clothes and expensive jewelry and he told me about the job:

The State of New Jersey funded the education of released prisoners and also had given low interest loans to people starting technical schools.  I was to design a website to promote this technical school that offered everything from car repair, computer associates degrees and welding classes.

I thought it sounded good.  I asked about the pay and the man in the track suit said “Five Car”.

“What do you mean by ‘five car’?” I asked  and he said “Five Car…One Two Three Four Five Car.  You get paid in car.”

I had never had anyone offer to pay me in cars before and I had to say I did not like the idea.  Where was I going to put five cars in New York City?  How would I sell them all?

I then asked him if I could have money instead and he said “Car better than money.  With car you can drive taxi, make own taxi company.  Taxi make good money.  Make $600 a day driving taxi.  Lease other car for $100 a day for four car.  Make $1000 a day with car..No tax.”

I still was not interested in getting cars as payment.  I asked him why he could not pay me in regular money and he went on a long winded spiel about how easy America was and how he had started a school “for free” and how he also ran a Car Donation Charity that he used to make money for auctions where he was the only bidder and his used car lot would sell the cars for a profit while his “school” would get the cash earned in the auction “donated” and the people who donated the cars would get a tax deduction based on the auction price.

Apparently the first law of his business was that you never pay anyone in cash, so he decided that he had to pay me in cars.

I turned him down.

Every so often I see car donation charities advertising and I then wonder what sort of scheme this charity is funding.  Like he said, America is “easy” but only if you are willing to exploit it for your own gain.

Yes, I just wrote the above as a title for a post because I felt it was about as accurate as I could get in six words or less. I have written other posts on this topic and most deal with IT recruiters who are based in both the United States and in India. I guessed that there is probably a massive unexploited resource in opinions on them from India as well so I decided to look for it. Luckily English is used in India and it is used by Indians to communicate with other Indians so I searched.

This search involved a website called Desi Crunch that reviews these recruiting companies from an Indian perspective.

http://www.desicrunch.com/

When you got to the review section you will see there is a cross scripting vulnerability where someone was able to fill it up with names of people instead of companies. I figured that this was done to cover up information written there so I kept on digging. What I found was that the recruiters based in the US actually charge for H1B applications, withold payment for labor, refuse to give the worker their w-2 forms should they actually get a job in the US and sometimes even force the workers to be “housed” someplace under their control either in India and sometimes in the US.

I then took out an add on Craiglist in Hyberdabad. I got many responses and some of them were downright scarey and others were hoping I would be able to get a them a job, but I appreciate everyone who took time to e-mail me (you know who you are, because I am sending you a link to this)

This is the ad I took out.

http://hyderabad.craigslist.co.in/sad/3691485341.html

From the responses to this and from reading about things on various websites I have a good idea what happens in these cases but I still am short some evidence so I do not want to name names yet because accusations of human trafficking are pretty big and one mistake would either unfairly end someone’s legitimate business and maybe end my career, so pardon my caution.

Here is what we see in the USA.

A recruiter copies an old job description that they gleened from Dice ages ago.

They post that job as a new position (google a line in a job description and you can often see the original one it came from)

They get get resumes in word format (they either toss out pdf format resumes or they request one in MS Word)

They find a real job offered by a real recruiter in the USA.

They submit a resume sent in for the non existant job after they modified it to make the candidate unqualified and demanding too much money. They also try to claim sole representation of the client thus locking them out of the job application process.

They also submit H1B candidates to this job and try to get the company to accept the cheaper, more qualified Indian applicants.

They hope that the company recieved too many unqualified applicants from citizens and green card holders and needs to go the H1B sponsorship route.

Meanwhile back in India……

Adverts are placed offering jobs either in America or as a recruiter for a phone call center in India calling American clients. You just need a phone and access to a computer.

Since recruiting in America from an Indian call center (usually a VoIP number forwarded to their mobile phone) is slow their employer offers them a chance at “IT Training” at their “School” for a fee but promise them the opportunity to go and work in America.

So they go to School, and according to my sources that school is often 10 to 20 people crammed in one room to sleep and they are made to clean everything, often in the whole building where the “school” is located (because the Recruiters also run a cleaning service, so they get their cleaners to pay to clean and they get building managers to pay them for their cleaning services). Most of the school consists of tech lessons without a computer, sometimes just a guy reading from a book. One source told me that after cleaning the “instructor” read them “Oracle For Dummies” that was on a PDF file on his laptop.

Training like this goes on for a while. Some places give free food and others make the students pay for food but everyone agreed that the training was hardly training at all.

Next, they are told there is a position open for them that needs to be filled immediately. The company they work with in the US loves their “training program” but they need fees to expedite their visa application (an illegal demand in the USA). They are then sent home to their family with the good news and they try to come up with the money. My sources told me anywhere ranging from $50 to $1000 (approx) are then given as well as essential documents like their passports, old pay stubs, and degrees or professional certifications.

Back in the USA lets say the recruiter has shut out citizens and green card holders or convinced the employer that cheap H1B labor is the way to go and their investment will pay off. The employer may be told that the candidate is already in the USA but their visa is about to expire. So they arrange for a phone interview. Lets just say it is for a Linux and Oracle administration job.

Back in India, the H1B candidate is told the employer wants to talk to him via skype. A skype call is made and the employer is presented as another Indian. This is not the employer but usually an employee in the US office of the recruiting company. The interviewer asks the candidate questions about his life and family but not tech questions. One source told me that the skype interview was about how American women loved to date Indian men and he would have American women all over him the moment he arrived.

Back in America, The recruiter just finished pretending he was the employer interviewing the candidate. He will interview every candidate in India the same way because there is more money to be made off of them by giving them hope. But now he arranges for a phone interview with the real people offering the job. They have not spoken to him before, only the other partner or perhaps they spoke to him when he used his “American Name”. So they call and ask him questions about Linux and Oracle. Since he also works as a sysadmin he can answer the questions correctly. He knows what questions to ask them as well. He does good in the initial phone screen. If it would be for a job he is not familiar with he will take out a classified ad or use one of his contacts on Orkut to have them do the phone screen with the company pretending to be the candidate.

Back in India, all Candidates are told they have the job but now they must get money very quickly to fly to America. Those that cannot come up with the money are thrown back into useless phone work for commission or just tossed out. Those that remain are told to give the money to the recruiter so he can buy the tickets for them. Many of these people are from the lower classes and have no idea what is entailed in things like Visas, international air travel or whatnot. The more generous ones will now allow them to get free meals while waiting, maybe out of “generosity” or maybe just to discourage them from leaving when there may be more money to be made from them. There may be 10 or more Candidates giving airfare to the US (likely inflated) to the recruiter at this point (the cheapest from Hyderabad to Chicago is about $1200 one way).

Back in the USA, the employers want an interview with the candidate that they think is in America. The recruiter tries to stall them long enough to make sure they get the guy over there. It is very rare to get to this point so they have to get the India side to hurry up and the American side must delay without offending the recruiter. Most of the time it is a “sick relative” and the candidate had to return to India, but they are on their way back now because they want to interview (this makes it so the employer might feel bad for the candidate too). Candidates told me how they often had to make up how a relative had died and that was why they were returning tto India.

Back in India the Candidate chosen is now rushed off to the airport if everything is in order. The other Candidates are told their time will come too, or told that this person got to fly to America first because they paid a special fee and the recruiters would be happy to pay a fee for them as well if they can get more money together.

In America the candidate is met at the airport by the US recruiter and taken for intensive coaching for the interview. Most likely the interview fails. It is hard to have someone with no IT skill to fake a real face to face interview. When this happens the candidate is told he must pay for housing in America and get his family to pay for a return plane ticket. He thought he was coming to America to get the job, but often had no idea it was just for an interview. If he cannot get the plane ticket the recruiter will call the INS on him and get him deported. He is told that he could be sent to jail forever in America for any infraction against the recruiter so his family had better pay up. Most of the time a whole family has gone broke sending a member to America and then getting them to return.

On the off chance the candidate is hired, the recruiter will be paid by the employer and then pay the candidate. It is here that the Candidate finds out that the recruiter may hold his entire paycheck or at least take 50% of it. He is then threatened with deportation at every infraction against the recruiter and if the employer realizes they have hired an inexperienced person they will fire them, and then the recruiter will hold the whole paycheck (sometimes only 50%) as a “penalty” and still demand they get their family to pay for their flight home.

During this whole time the recruiting company is sending out fake job notices and collecting resumes and they may even be benifiting from women and minority owned business preferences in Federal and Local government contracts.

Back in India, the crowd of IT and H1B visa hopefulls is out of money and getting angry at having to pay to be janitors while waiting for their jobs to start. At some point an excuse to get them all out of the building is given like for repainting or something and the company vanishes leaving them broke and unable to get any of their money back. Most of the time it just moves accross town but since internet cafes cost money and mobile phones do as well and they often never know what legal path to take in their own country to try to get restitution. Perhaps they know that the court would favor a higher caste over the lower ones anyway?

So that is the run down of examples I have gleaned from comments and some of the victims. I find it shocking that companies operating in the US often have their “offshore” wing charging people to work for them and keeping them in poor living conditions. I am going to try to find more solid proof and name some real names here in the US.

A problem I have is that when I get interested in something, even if it is unimportant and not vital to my well being or even that entertaining I will spend a stupid amount of time on it.  This is a good quality to have in most ways.  It means I have an attention span, it means I can stay focused and it means I can solve problems and enjoy doing so.  But the down side is that sometimes I forget to eat lunch.    Sometimes I will be looking up and classifying obscura instead of washing my clothes and then I will have to go down to The Gap to buy underwear and socks because The Gap is open later than the laundry room in my building.

I did this the other day while looking up fake recruiters and I believe I have various Modus Operandi classified for them.

The first part is psychology.

When you are looking for a job you must be positive in your outlook and your interactions with people.  This serves two purposes in that it helps to have a cheerful demeanor just to make your period of unemployment more pleasant and it also serves others as well so you do not subject people to complaining all day.  Also being positive right away during a phone call or an e-mail exchange makes potential employers at least want to continue correspondence with you, and that increases the chance of employment later.   The fake recruiter exploits this by increasing the chance that you will communicate with them just because that is your demeanor with everyone.

If you say something like “I do not deal with Indian / Russian recruiters” to them and it turns out it is a legitimate agency with a legitimate employee who happens to be from the same country as one of the fake recruiters then you will look (deservedly) like an ass.  But the fake recruiter will exploit this, both to keep getting information from you and keep that e-mail correspondence happening.

So, what do they do with the information?

First I heard that they keep on cutting your pay rate lower and lower so they can give a cut down the recruitment chain.  If you ask for $50 an hour they will ask later if you can go down to $48 and then to $46  and finally down to $30.  This is supposed to reflect their unwillingness to take a cut out of their money to pay down the recruitment chain.  So a job that is $75 would mean a $25 cut for the recruiter but if a number of people sent you to that recruiter they need to be paid so instead of cutting out $10 from their take they cut $10 out of yours but at $2 a phone call or e-mail.  Then when it comes to pay, they get you to switch from W-2 to 1099 and then never pay you keeping it all for themselves.  This has a logic to it but I have not found any evidence for it.  When people do not pay someone for work there is always some sort of evidence of a rant online or a lawsuit filed in small claims court but I have not seen this.

So, what are these fake recruiters doing?

As far as I can tell they really never want to get you a job.  They want one thing: An e-mail with a resume in word format attached.  They use this for two things.  They take your information (and sometimes your name) and tack it on to another person wanting an H1B visa.  Then they take your e-mail, re-edit it to make it seem like you are giving them permission to exclusively represent them for the job.  This enables them to submit your edited resume, which has been edited to make you unqualified, to the HR department of a company.  When they tell the HR department not to take duplicate entries of their client resumes the HR department complies, since they have better things to do than to check to see which recruitment companies are legitimate or not, and then they submit their own candidates who may have your real qualifications listed as their own to see if the company will sponsor a H1B visa for them.

If they sponsor one, then the fake recruitment company gets a large payment from the hopeful immigrant and continues to get a kickback from original company.

Like SPAMMING operations, these recruiters rely on volume, cheap foreign phone banks, VOIP numbers that correspond with the location of their corporate mailbox in the USA or Canada and they do not get that many “hits” from corporations.  When they do it is one from an area that needs filling right away, so they hobble real candidates by getting e-mails and maybe resumes from them while promoting their own H1B visa candidates.

How do you tell if a recruiter is fake or not?

It can be tough, these people go through great lengths to mimic real recruiters.  Their websites will have corporate giants on as “clients” (usually just a logo) but try to contact G.E and ask them if some small website that claims them as a client actually is their client.  I tried for about one hour and it seems impossible to get someone who knows about these things on the phone.  One thing I realized is to look at the headers of the e-mails.  If they give a North Carolina location but the IP address in the headers is from Hyderabad India or Murmansk Russia, then you should assume they are fake.

The earlier post I gave the example of Rabindranath Tagor being changed to “Bob Smith” and I claimed that they just changed the name to sound “more American” but now I realize that though some people do this, others actually assume the name in India (legally change it or take on the identity but not the citizenship of a resume sender) and sometimes a “Bob Smith” from Mumbai comes to America on an H1B visa.

One of the best ways to check
myvisajobs.com

This is a website that I think is used by people wanting H1B visas to check which recruiter gets a good portion of them.  So if you enter your recruiter name there you can see how many Visas they got and what the average salary was for them.  Remember that legitimate recruiters get H1B visas too.  You can check Robert Half on that site and see they have had over 200 H1B visas granted since 2001.  That is expected for a global recruiter.

Now check the name of some company that actively solicits your information from you.  My target company (name not being mentioned yet) has a one room temporary office on the outskirts of a Research Triangle town in North Carolina and an office in Hyderabad India.  Their calls frequently drop do to bad VOIP connections.  Anyway, they have 30 more H1B visas accepted in the USA than Robert Half international with a salary for H1B visas being $40,000 less a year than the ones granted to Robert Half (I am not trying to suck up to Robert Half but good work on not being sketchy!)

In conclusion, do research, be wary, and if you get suckered (like I have) try to go on damage control by contacting the HR of the company that the phony recruiter claims to represent and explain to them that no one but you is exclusively representing you and ask what recruiter they use (if any).  Or get a legitimate recruiter to advocate for you, because they will have a stake in your career as well as their own business.

—–edit——

To clarify before more comments are attempted to this post:

1. I am not anti-immigration.  I just oppose people pretending to be recruiters for jobs in the USA when they are really using it as a front for immigration services.    So please do not use me in some kind of anti-immigration spiel you have going on in your head because I will likely oppose it.

2. I am not racist or “anti-Indian”.  I should not even have to deny this but this is one of the tactics I suspected is used to prevent discussion of fake recruiters and their tactics.  I will continue to discuss them whether they are Indian, American or Russian companies.  If they do tech recruiting in the USA but that is not really what they are doing, then they will be discussed.

I am amazed at how fast I got responses to this post.  I hit a nerve with both the anti-immigration crowd and the Pro-Sketchy-Recruiter Crowd but I am going to be vigilant with moderating the responses since I want this site to be a one-way conduit of information…from me 🙂