Colo. unemployed fooled by bait-and-switch job ads

DENVER – With thousands of Coloradoans out of work, there’s a good chance you know someone who is desperately seeking a job.

A FOX31 News investigation, however, found that some of the employment ads posted on Craigslist and the Denver Post classifieds are not completely legit. Instead, some of the jobs which sound too good to be true, are actually being used as a “bait and switch” to convince the unemployed to cough up money they don’t have.

Joblink owner Ross Splitt admits he’s been posting job ads that aren’t “actual jobs” to drum up business for his Denver based employment service. “Joblink” charges job-seekers $65 for up to six months of job leads.

We started investigating “Joblink” after we were contacted by former employee Kyle Westphal.

“I started to find out some pretty shady things about the company,” Westphal told us.

Westphal answered calls from job-seekers who saw the positions posted online or in the newspaper. He says Joblink trained him to mislead those callers, and tell them they could apply for the fictitious job, but only if they paid Joblink’s fee up front.

“I knew the jobs they are calling about do not exist,” Westphal said. “It made me start to really feel sorry for those people.”

Westphal says his guilty conscience eventually got the best of him.

FOX31 News sent an undercover employee to sign up for Joblink’s service and found some of the jobs leads we paid $65 dollars for were not available, or did not exist.

For example, we found a “Home Sales Specialist” job at Kohl’s department store that Kohl’s claims they had “no knowledge of.”

Joblink’s owner did not want to talk about the allegations on camera. However, Ross Splitt sent us a statement which says -in part- “We verify our jobs once a week by visiting corporate websites to make sure the job is still listed. That’s the best we can do, given our existing manpower. But even if we had an automated system to verify jobs daily, there’s a chance the job could be closed by the time our client calls.”

As for the job ads he’s been posting on Craigslist and the classifieds, Splitt says, “In hindsight, I agree that I should have used actual jobs in the ads instead of composite descriptions…of jobs that we typically have available (at Joblink).”

After we contacted Splitt, he agreed to stop posting job ads that are not “actual” jobs.

A total of 46 complaints have been filed against “Joblink” with the BBB. But because a majority of those complaints have been resolved, the company still has an “A” rating.

July 30, 2010
source: independent.ie