Virtual Thoughts

What can I say? Am I a sucker or what?

I have this client way back 2005. He owns an online store that sells shoes. I worked for him as customer service email support. You cannot imagine the amount of emails we receive everyday, more than a hundred, and I have to clean them all up in a day cause I don’t want clients complaining us about having bad customer service. In the long run, I couldn’t handle it myself because there just so many of them, complaints, request, inquiry and refund emails. So I took on 2 more customer service agent to help me with the work and we manage to organize everything and get the emails answered back within 24 hours.

The problem was, this client of mine is always late on payment, sometimes he is even a month late. So I have to shell out the payment for my assistant agents, which is a tiresome thing on my budget. I resigned from the job in the long run, cause the client is a very irresponsible person, every time I try to reach him via chat, email or phone call regarding problems with the shipment, he never responded. I mean where can you find a Virtual employee always hounding the employer regarding problems to his own business? Worse, during our last few weeks, he didn’t pay us.

Within the three years, once in a while, he would pop up in my messenger and request me to work for him again. Of course, i said no.

Last March 2008, he asked me to work again and promised that this time it will be different etc, etc, etc. And idiot that I am, I believe him, because he told me I will be working with his mom. Hey, his mom may be a better person and a better businesswoman than he is. I checked his website and read through everything, and it showed an intelligent person behind it, which is his mom. Besides, his mom is a teacher you know, so there is this amount of respectability in there.

But hey, what do you know? The mom turns out to be like her son. She promises to pay and then nothing, didn’t respond to my email and didn’t answer the phone. What kind of teacher America has now? Of course, this is not a general statement, but hey, she is a teacher! I have always hold teachers in the highest regards and she is giving them a bad name.

So I worked from March 15 - May 9 and didn’t even get any payment, except for the downpayment of 40% I asked from the total agreed working pay at the start of the month. What a bunch of cheats!

The son promises to pay, he said he will not scammed me, but what am I supposed to think if I don’t receive any word or update from them two?

The lesson of this experience is - once bitten, twice should really be shy!

Almost everyday, I checked out Craigslist for any new job postings. One is to see if there are new work opportunities and the other is to check what other tasks people are outsourcing. The second reason for checking Craigslist is so I can update and upgrade myself. It doesn’t pay to be a stick in the mud. All of us has to keep up with the ever changing time and technology.

I was checking through the ads in Bangalore when I found an online job that I really like, which is answering emails. The owner of the ad said that he gets around 500-1,000 emails a day and need someone to help him answer all the emails. So I applied for the job. I got a response that very day. But then, I was a little suspicious because the response was a scripted one. Usually, the business or individuals who responds to the job ads reply in a more personal manner.

The name of the CEO is Martin Feldman and his website is www.careerexperts.org.

He gave me a series of email responses, four different emails to be exact. Based on the email he gave me, he is a recruiter and has been operating for 15 years already in North America. My question is, if he is a recruiter in North America, then why is he based in Asia as he told me? Another question is, if he has a list of the jobs available, then why is his site promoting writing resume? This doesn’t fit at all. I sent him 2 emails asking him if there are really jobs for the job applicants. I didn’t receive an answer for that.

My job was to post in various cities in Craigslist, and then reply back to the emails I have received with the first document. Then when the job applicants reply again, I am to send another scripted email. This all sound very fishy to me.

So what I did, I googled his name and viola, it’s confirmed, he is a scam artist. His real name is Harris Black and you can read all about him in http://www.harrisblackwatch.com/

Well I am glad that after four years of working online, I am not so naive after all. I must admit that I got scammed several times when I was starting out and thank God, I was able to find out info about this guy so I do not help him scam other people.

I was browsing through the internet the other day when I chance upon this blog posting. Believing that it will be helpful to let people know about another kind of scam going around, I contacted the blog owner and asked his permission to post his posting on my blog site. He readily agreed and so please read on:

Another Money Scam

With ref to the article below in today’s Star, I strongly advise all of you to STAY AWAY from all these scams. Time and again, all of them have been proven to be bogus.

This is not to even mention the cases of online investments with daily returns! Billions have gone down the drain.

I’m sure many of you have also received emails congratulating you on winning a lottery in a foreign land OR asking to use your bank account to ‘help’ these punks ‘transfer’ their so called ‘inheritance’. There is so much of bulls*** going on these days as we move further and further into the frontiers of a border less world.

So please… BEWARE !

The Star Online : Thursday June 28, 2007

Two fall for million-ringgit ‘lucky draw’

By BERNARD SEE

PENANG: A clerk and a contractor were cheated of more than RM50,000 after being told that they had won RM4.8mil in a lucky draw.

The first incident occurred in Air Itam on June 16 when the 31-year-old clerk received a call from a man informing her that she had won RM1mil in a contest.

But in order to collect the winnings, she must deposit a processing fee of RM12,000. After paying that amount, she was told that she had won a further RM3.7mil.

The clerk was then told to bank in another RM28,000 if she wanted the winnings.

She did as instructed and the man later asked for even more money.

She told him that she had no more money and the phone calls stopped. She realised that she had been cheated and made a report at the Patani Road police station on June 20.

The contractor, 28, was cheated of RM10,600 in a similar manner on June 22.

He only realised he had been cheated after depositing the money.

Police are finding it hard to locate the suspects said to be Chinese nationals as they used bank accounts which are “rented” from individuals whom they had befriended.

It was learnt that these individuals are paid between RM200 and RM300 a month so that their bank accounts could be used to accept the deposits from the victims.

A police spokesman said people kept falling for these scams despite cases such as there being reported by the media.

“The local police are working closely with their counterparts in Johor, Kuala Lumpur and Selangor where such scams have also been reported,” said the spokesman.

****Thanks to Mohammed for the permission of re-posting his article on my blog site. Please visit his blog site at:****

http://drnaz.wordpress.com/2007/06/28/another-money-scam/

Getting Ripped Off comes in many forms, being unpaid is of course the major kind of ripped off, but a different type of ripped off is not getting paid on time.

I have one client who is very nice and accomodating. I have been working for him more than a year already and I have nothing but praises for him as an employer. The hard thing is dealing with his bookeeper who is in charge of my timecheck and payment. It is bad already that all my payments are paid to my sister Paypal’s account in the US ( Paypal Philippines is only good for sending money and not receiving ), and the US check I deposit in my dollar account here using my sister’s US check takes 30-35 days to clear. This means I am able to get hold of my earnings 30-35 after my client will have deposited it to my sister’s Paypal account.

I have informed the bookeeper many times of the discrepancies in the Quickbooks Unpaid Bill Report regarding my working time. It is a good thing my employer has an online log in software so I am able to check my online time in and time out. I have submitted my working timecheck based on the online time log report so the bookeeper can make a comparison with our QB and see the discrepancies, but still no word from her. This is all very frustrating for me! And to think I have called her several times regarding this matter!

It is not like they are behind one month paying me. For heaven’s sake, I haven’t received my payment for March, April and May!

So a note to all virtual employers,  please make sure that you pay your offshore workers on time. Hey, we are working hard you know so we expect not only to be paid on time but also be paid according to the hours we put in.

Writing about my experience of “almost got scammed” reminded me of another time in my life where I really got scammed! This happened earlier than my Spanish Lottery Experience, when I was still a novice with online jobs.

While searching thru for online jobs, I came across an ad looking for as usual “data entry operators”. I replied to the ad and I was directed to the head of the company Dr. Lim. He is based in Malaysia and is a “doctor”.  To my credit I did call him and was able to talk to him several times. He even gave me his full name and the name of the bank where he is a “big” client. I looked for the bank’s website and called up their number. True enough the person answering it told me that yes, Dr. Lim is a client of theirs.

So to show that I am serious and earnest in my quest to work online, I was asked to pay $100.00 which Dr. Lim assured me I will earn back quickly.  After paying the money, I received an email saying my work is to post ads online promoting the company, promoting Dr. Lim’s business and promoting the same ad that enticed me to join the company. What a crap! That will mean that I will be deceiving people into joining the network with no actual job but just to post the same ads! I was even given the email address of my supposedly “head”. I emailed the head but got no reply. After that, there wasn’t even a weekly, monthly or even yearly newsletter, or a courtesy email asking how I am doing with the “job” or even an e-christmas card!

And up to this date, I have yet to hear from them .