Catching up on the recent episode about scams, wanted to share this story. Not too long ago I was in the job market. I applied for a few jobs on indeed, and this media marketing agency called me to set up an interview. They offered me a position on the spot.
So precursor, I come from a sales background. I get that immediately people assume sales can be scummy, but it really doesnt have to be. I honestly do my best to make both the customer and my boss happy. I don’t believe in taking advantage of people, I can only sell a service or a product in good conscience if I genuinely believe that it could help the customer and it’s being sold at a reasonable price.
That being said, I picked up pretty quickly this company was full of shit. Essentially they’re scamming small business owners all over the US and Canada. There were TVs all over the sales floor room showing the total amount brought in each day, it was anywhere from $30-60k per day. And what’s crazy is that there’s like hundreds of these companies all over the country doing the same exact scam, convincing business owners that they need to sign up to be put onto voice search platforms, and that there’s customers in their area that are using siri or alexa to search for their products or services but since they’re not on those platforms, they’re missing out on opportunities. its wild.
What’s even crazier about this whole thing is like… once I realized, I was like who here knows about this?? The training manager was so good at playing this off like it’s a legitimate company, answering any question about legitimacy or how this whole thing works. Like you start to question all the employees. Are they oblivious to everything? Do I just know better than them because I have a strong sales background and they don’t? (a lot of them were younger and came from non sales backgrounds) Do they just believe it because they’re impressionable? Or do they just not give a fuck about taking money from old people? Most of them agree to this because their business is failing and are hopeful this will help increase business. It’s horrible.
There’s so much to this whole thing, it’s been a few months since I was there but I remember the jist of the script they had us use. if anyone on the crew sees this and is interested I’d be happy to call in to one of the shows one day to explain and answer any questions because it really opened my eyes to like how these companies work behind the scenes. If needed I can put together some receipts to verify my story. Once I realized what was going on, I stopped showing up. I felt so horrible about it, but I’d love to share my experience in the hopes that it could help some people!! The way this company works, they charge an upfront fee of like $150-300 and then $20/month to “maintain the service” or whatever. And that $30-60k per day is just in upfront fees combined with their “upsell department” (where they speak to business owners that already paid the upfront fee and convince them they need all this extra stuff that costs sooo much more). its really sick and twisted how they’re taking advantage of people, and mostly older people, and im sure theres a ton of people not realizing that $20 is still being taken out of their banks each month for absolutely no reason but to buy these shady business owners fancy boats and cars. its gross.