News article: http://www.wftv.com/news/19970193/detail.html
Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4RN-MfY9EUE
This nicely confirms many of the complaints that have been made about fake job offers/interviews, and once again they've found a person on the inside with a conscience, very nice work. What I would also have liked to know is if they contacted some of the companies listed on Career Network to see how many actually know they're listed there, beyond the ones that Three Stars provided. They did this before after all.
A quote from the PDF there:
"...all of the jobs posted on the Career Network Web sites are provided by actual employers seeking job applicants for open positions. Career Network does not unilaterally post jobs without an employer's request to do so"We already know that Career Network has reposted jobs on their sites without permission from any employer, some related sites have openly admitted this. Other bloggers have contacted companies listed on Career Network who turned out to have nothing to do with them.
So you have to wonder what he is actually saying here. Does Kress think that a job post on another job board constitutes a request to repost it anywhere he likes? Personally I'll assume he's just being full of sh*t as usual.
Action 9 claims that Alec Difrawi is running the companies and he's clearly there on camera. The BBB records for Career Network and Three Stars Media have also recently been updated to list him as a contact. This comes as no surprise to anyone who's been watching.
What might however is that Keith Kress has made some very clear assurances in the past that Difrawi had absolutely nothing to do with Three Stars (for proof, please contact me in private). That would seem to be an outright lie, unless he started there recently. Surprising for a lawyer perhaps? No, I guess not.
So they're "working to resolve" BBB complaints. One would think they could have been more careful with this from the beginning considering their previous BBB records. They should be very familiar with those procedures by now.
Funny how they don't seem to see a problem with the way they advertise. If they actually told people more clearly they were just signing up for advertising and that these offers are in no way related to the job application, they might get a lot less complaints from people feeling they were just spammed. People are not being clearly informed of what they are doing, otherwise they would obviously not complain so much. But their business model seems based on this deceit, and probably wouldn't survive without it.
Who wants to bet what they will be calling themselves next month?
Regarding Mr. Difrawi, I can confirm that he's been doing business at the same location since 2006, as I spoke with him there during the interview process.
ReplyDeleteBy then, there was plenty of documentation of his previous activities on the web. And, he has followed the same pattern in succeeding years, with company names constantly changing.
What's remarkable to me is that, with all of the periodic exposes of his business model, he has managed to remain active and, apparently, flourish.
Three Stars apparently posted an official response on a blog here:
ReplyDeletehttp://threestarsresponse.wordpress.com/
Alec Difrawi is there named as the Creative Director of Three Stars. Note that the bank fraud conviction they mention there is not the previous job scams Action 9 was referring to (he was never convicted for those), so it's a bit curious why they bring that up. Yes, he does indeed have quite a record.
They have also indeed started responding to the complaints against Career Network:
http://www.orlando.bbb.org/newsearch2.asp?ComID=073300030454344
Probably a bit late to get rid of that F rating, but you have to give them some credit.