The scammer at my door

I was sitting here sorting tax receipts when my dogs went crazy over a young man at my door. I eased my way out (think Elastiwoman) and managed to keep the “attack” labs in the house. The young man thanked me for protecting him from the dogs, told me his parents lived on the next block, and explained he was selling books for a University of Houston fundraiser. He said that his UH theater group was trying to raise money to go to England to film a movie.

I am generally a sucker for any student doing a fundraiser. I hate sweets but buy more candy from kids than anyone I know. I never use those overpriced coupon books, but somehow always end up with one in the kitchen drawer. Got wrapping paper, raffle tickets? I’ll buy them. I don’t know exactly what it was about today’s sales pitch that set my neck hairs on end, but my gut told me that I was going to get hustled if I bought this guy’s story.

He told me that Barnes and Noble donated books to UH for the fundraiser and that most people were buying the books and donating them to children’s hospitals. I asked him for his student ID or any literature that might describe the theater group’s plan. He said he couldn’t show me those things because his wallet was stolen, but he told me that I could find the description at www.integritypgm.com. I said I would check it out and explained that since his parents lived in the neighborhood, he could come back another day.

Well, the Integrity Program website had no information about University of Houston. It looked to be nothing more than a magazine sales company and a shady one at that. A little more web searching netted a Portland Tribune article about Integrity Program. From the article:

To work for Integrity Program, they suggest, was to naively answer a newspaper “help wanted” advertisement promising free travel and easy money and suddenly enter a world of violent and abusive sales crew managers who transport vanloads of young “sales agents” from town to town and state to state.

A world of being put up in cheap hotels, where young agents are sometimes physically and sexually assaulted and often emotionally abused, and are forced to work 12 and 14 hours a day, six days a week, for $20 dollars a day or less.

And, in essence, the young people, usually age 18 to 25 but occasionally younger, have no choice — or believe they have no choice — but to stay on the job. Because crew managers won’t give them the money — either the money they’ve earned or money they were promised when they hired on — to get a bus ticket back home.

…snip…

Last October, a man who represented himself as a magazine sales agent and who was going door-to-door in Sellwood, physically and sexually assaulted a woman after knocking on the victim’s door and forcing his way inside. Police say the man, age 21 to 25, was cleanshaven and wore a dark suit with a pink-striped tie. No one has been apprehended in the crime.

…snip…

Meanwhile, the numbers attached to the accidents or the assault cases don’t speak to another, almost entirely unreported, category of violence: The assaults against sales agents by their bosses or by other members of the crew.

Jan Margosian, a spokeswoman for the Oregon Department of Justice, who also has monitored the industry for years, says: “There have been indications that kids are murdered. They can’t find them. They’re never found again.”

I doubt that the young man at my door was up to anything worse than hustling overpriced books and magazines, but after reading about this particular company, my doors were locked. Did I mention how happy I am that my three labs have deep menacing barks?

You can read more here and here.

~ by Miche on March 26, 2007.