International Marketing Innovations scam, cydcor, dsmax, boiler room, illegal, fraud Richmond, Virginia

First off, it should be known that International Marketing Innovations is one of two Richmond subsidiaries of Cydcor, a.k.a DS-MAX, one of the most notorious scams discussed on this website. Just search the name to learn about the hundreds of other Cydcor front companies that are breaking the law and destroying young job applicants across the U.S., Canada, and the U.K. This is the same company that panhandles for fake "charities" and keeps the money in San Diego, that sends people to sell third and fourth phone lines to intimidated senior citizens in their homes in Ohio, and switches whole New York apartment buildings to new energy providers without consent. The IMI branch in Richmond is one of the offices that works for Quill, a subsidiary of Staples that sells mail-order office supplies. There is another Cydcor office in Richmond, "Global Business Strategies," which sells business phone lines for Verizon; I know nothing specific about that office beyond the copious dirt on Cydcor generally.

Because Cydcor's reputation preceeds them, pain is always taken at IMI to avoid revealing just what company you are applying/working for. For my entire interview and employment period, the name "the company" was used exclusively to refer to the organization which owned IMI. The word "Cydcor" was never spoken until a month after I started, when someone slipped up. This should be the #1 sign that you are being scammed--no reputable company has to hide its name from its own employees! The paranoia over the company being identified also extends to its employees, who use fake names on job posting sites so that they cannot be traced down once their scam is exposed and they have to skip town. Right now, you can view postings from "Lily Rose" about IMI (no such person exists there, or anywhere). I am unconvinced that "Jasen Eastwood" is the real name of the so-called "owner," either.

The basic form of the Cydcor scam that I saw at IMI was as follows: advertise a position in "marketing," "sales," or "promotions." Invite everyone who applies for an interview (the "owner" did nothing but interview about a hundred applicants, all day, every day). Offer a job to everyone who comes in. Only on the second "interview day" (eg, shadowing an IMI "corporate trainer" as he walks around for eight hours trying to cold-sell office supplies to every door on a block) do you find out that what you will be doing is soliciting small businesses to buy office supplies. You will receive no benefits, no reimbursement for the minimum $100 you will spend on gas every week, and, most relevantly to the scam, nowhere near minimum wage no matter how hard you work or how much money you generate for Quill and Cydcor.

There are three chief red flags to Cydcor/IMI. There is nothing dishonorable about sales, but the Cydcor/IMI implementation of it is very unethical and, at least in Virginia, outright illegal. It is against Virginia law to make uninvited solicitations of sales to ANY business without a peddler's license, and it is against local laws as well in many of the jurisdictions where IMI operates. Needless to say, not a single employee of IMI has such a license, nor will the requirement for one ever be mentioned until you are busted by the police for doing your job. Even if IMI owner "Jasen" (likely not his real name) agrees to pay your fine for you, the criminal record is yours and yours alone.

Do you want to have to answer "yes" to the question about being convincted of a crime, or risk failing the background check for lying, EVERY time you apply for a job for the rest of your life? You will be unable to get another job and locked in to the IMI scam if you are convincted of solicitation without a license in a Virginia court, and if you work here for more than a month, you WILL get picked up by the police. It only takes ONE business owner to call in a complaint and make it happen, and IMI's policy is for you to illegally solicit three hundred businesses every week. Do those odds sound good to you?

After the fact that you are required to break the law and risk arrest literally every day you go to work at IMI, the second of the three major scam aspects is the lack of pay. You will be told that you earn 28% commission and a $20 bonus for each sale you make, with more to come once you are "promoted." This simply never happens. At least half of your sales will be reported to you as returned, unpaid, or not qualifying, or your check will just be hundreds of dollars short with no explanation. I literally saw people at IMI called out for earning $800 of "personal profit" by closing $2850 in sales the previous day, but then mysteriously given $150 checks for that pay period. The pay scam works on both levels--Quill happily takes the money from customers that they later decide do not "qualify" for a commission payment and withholds it from IMI, or money that does go to IMI is not filtered down to the salesman at the promised rate. In an average week at IMI, one of the "Fave 5" salesman (the top performers as defined by "Jasen") will generate $4000 in sales for Quill. He will also work from 7 AM to 6 PM Monday through Friday for a 55-hour week, pay $100 in gas for driving from the office to his "territory," and pay at least $25 for fast-food lunch since there's nowhere to store food on the road, neither of which will be reimbursed. If you are lucky enough to get a $200 check that week (and someone who makes as much as $10,000 a year at Cydcor is a top-percenter indeed) then you have profited $75 and made $1.36 for each hour of work. Congratulations, you have lived the "high roller" lifestyle, and you get to move into a flophouse with 3 of your coworkers just to avoid being on the street!

The third and final of the major aspects of the scam is the constant defrauding of Quill by the Cydcor/IMI employees. Quill hardly deserves better, as they must have heard from thousands of ex-Cydcor victims alerting them to how this "outsourced face-to-face marketing firm" operates, but Quill (a subsidiary of Staples) happily retains Cydcor's services because it makes them so much money. Nonetheless, it's still wrong to have to falsify business types and employment numbers. Quill publishes an essentially impossible list of minimum full-time employees that must be at a business in order to qualify for a commission; if anyone has ever found an independently owned gift shop with 10 full-time employees, let me know. The list is an obvious attempt to establish loopholes that let Quill deny any commission at any time. The only way a single sale is ever made at IMI is to lie about the number of employees at a business. Tactics for lying on the commission forms are taught to every new recruit from day one. Usually this is done by winking at the business owner and explaining that it doesn't matter if he says 7 people work at his medical practice when it's really only 2; he has no idea that the number means anything and signs whatever you put in front of him. Sometimes, forms are falsified without the customer's knowledge. What happens either way is that 100% of commission applications that go through contain false statements, which everyone in the office knows.

This three-step plan to drain you of your money by making you buy gas for company business, work you for 55-hour weeks for less than a fifth of minimum wage, and force you to break the law and act unethically in every single interaction you have at work, is justified by the company on the promise that you will be a "millionaire" in the future if you just work hard enough at conning hapless small-town businesses into buying office supplies. Of course, the only "millionaires" at Cydcor are the founders who came up with a system for bilking their "employees" out of all of their money. IMI is an office where everyone is being scammed by someone else. Even the "owner" has to kick up a chunk of what he makes to his boss. He has to pay all of the operating expenses of the office and all the compensation of the employees (so much as it is), but receives no money from the company to do so. The "owners" are the long-con portion of the Cydcor scam--the 1 person in 5000 who manages to extract some success from a boiler-room sales job will have his pay hidden from him in a "business account" which he can only use to pay the $13,000 fee to open "his" office. He will celebrate being "in business for himself" even though he works for Cydcor and can only do exactly what Cydcor tells him; he is independent in name only, as a legal fiction to protect Cydcor from the inevitable lawsuits and debt that the scam brings on.

Cydcor opens 110 offices a year and closes 105. The owners of the 105 lose everything and are left in the cold by the company that promised to make them millionaires. This is inevitably what will happen to "Jasen" as well; the Richmond territory was already burned by a previous failed Cydcor Quill office when he got here a year ago, and he can't find any new zones to give out that his own agents haven't visited in the last two months. There are no new sales to make and Jasen is not only far from his goal of being a millionaire, he probably hasn't even paid off the debt he incurred to open the office. Even though he was the primary agent of the scam that tried to swindle me, and constantly told me lies, I feel a little sorry for him since no one deserves what is in his near future: bankruptcy for sure, unemployability highly likely, homelessness or other total ruin a distinct possibility.

I've outlined the major reasons (forced to commit crimes, barely any pay, forced to act unethically) that you do not want to work for International Marketing Innovations. I will now list a few of the smaller concerns.

There are no benefits whatsoever at this company. If you ask about health insurance, you will be given whatever answer Jasen feels like making up that day--you can get it in 60 days, you can get in 90 days, you can get it in 45 days, whatever. The reality is that the only people at IMI who have any health insurance are veterans who get it through the VA. Since IMI receives no funding downward from the Cydcor structure (money can move only one way in a MLM scheme), any benefits would have to come out of Jasen's pocket directly, and the first lesson you learn at IMI is that you never pay for anything that will benefit someone else, no matter how big or small. When you are trying to survive in America on the equivalent of Indonesian sweatshop wages, that $5 for your trainee's pizza lunch can be the difference in whether you yourself eat tonight or not. The company also does not perform proper tax withholding--even though you will see "deductions" on your meager paychecks for legally required tax, Medicare, and Social Security contributions, you will be told that the IRS never got that money and hit with a bill for 30% of your annual income come April.

The above is closely tied to the 1099 fraud perpretrated by IMI. They classify every single employee as an "independent contractor," meaning they do not have to pay you minimum wage, withhold your taxes, or contribute to any unemployment compensation for you. Unfortunately for them, the law clearly states that an employee who is told when and where to report for work, cannot set his own schedule, cannot determine how he performs the job, or requires company-provided materials to do the work, is not an independent contractor and must be treated as an ordinary employee. At IMI, your schedule is set by the company, your every interaction with customers down to the word is scripted at the office, and you can't make money without IMI-provided Quill commission forms. Cydcor is perhaps the biggest target of the current federal initiative to root out employee-classification fraud ( http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/18/business/18workers.html?em=&adxnnl=1&pagewanted=all&adxnnlx=1267244895-9avTair4O1lQNsPqurE9QQ ), and will likely be forced to fold if its true tax obligation and criminal activities in this area alone ever come fully to light.

The constant lying about the background of the "leaders" at IMI is also a routine Cydcor tactic used to translate sales tactics onto the company-essential goal of keeping fresh victims coming in for the scam. Jasen claims that he gave up a career as a college-educated computer engineer to work selling office supplies door to door in the summer in Houston. "Billy" has claimed to be a former analyst for Capital One and manager of two restaurants who decided that eeking out $40 sales of fax machine toner to woodshops in Ashland was a more fulfilling job choice. Look at the reports for other Cydcor subsidiaries and it's the same pattern--every "owner" and "leader" claims a college degree (but doesn't hang a diploma and uses the morning meeting to bash people who think they are "entitled" to a real job just beause they went to college) and gave up some other career with actual paychecks, perhaps one they are too young to have ever possibly had, in order to pursue the "opportunity" at Cydcor. Like the claims of "millionares" and "owners," it's all so much BS designed to fear-of-loss you into staying one more day at IMI and making 14 more dollars in commission for Jasen.

IMI is a company where everyone who works there is a "leader" or a "corporate trainer" or an "assistant director" because constant incentives need to be provided to make people forget about how little money they are making and how much illegal and unethical behavior they have to stomach in order to show up for work each day. Anyone who lasts more than a month before wising up to the scam will get "promoted," though the "CT" position just means you have longer hours and, in addition to trying to keep yourself from starving, also have to lie your a*s off and pitch the company to new recruits who you drive around multiple times per week. Even though they were all participants in scamming, me i feel sorry for jasen and all the rest of the cydcor "leaders" (especially the ones who had families to support) because the scam is set up to drain them and they are in too deep to get out, especially if they've accumulated criminal convictions in the course of their work that bar them from any other employment. Several people even moved from Houston to Richmond, leaving behind everyone they know outside of Cydcor, in order to follow Jasen to "his" new office; they have too much cognitive dissonance to leave now and will remain with IMI until the law catches up with Jasen or Cydcor and they arrive one morning to find the office locked and Jasen's phone cut off. I estimate this day will come no later than this summer, because the profits are already drying up and Jasen will only get more desparate in the months ahead, especially as economic recovery shrinks the pool of people willing to apply to and accept any job at all.

If you like breaking the law dozens of time a day, swallowing your ethics and committing fraud just to get paid, living on slave wages, lying to your friends and family about what you do because "door to door soliciting" is too embarassing, going on 4-hour car trips with pathological liars who spend the whole ride talking about all of their made-up past experiences with colleges and jobs, and pairing up for the day and splitting your potential sales in half because your "corporate trainer" can't afford gas this week, then perhaps working at Cydcor's International Marketing Innovations branch is for you. If none of those things sound appealing, and you're just desperate for a job, then you should go work at Burger King; you'll get paid five times as much, you will never get arrested for doing your job, and you will be able to look at yourself in the mirror at the end of every day.

Before I finish this post I want to predict how International Marketing Innovations/Cydcor employees will respond, based on past posts about Cydcor on this site (and the fact that there are HUNDREDS of such posts about HUNDREDS of different offices should tell you a lot). They will say that sales is "not for everyone." Since leaving Cydcor I've gotten a real job in real sales and I'm quite happy with it and good at it. There is nothing wrong with commissioned sales. If you want to work in commissioned sales, go find a reputable insurance agency and start selling for them. They won't make you break the law and they won't promise you 28% commission and then pay you less than a quarter of that. Cydcor's problem is that they abuse the independent contractor law, they don't provide any way to make a living on commission AND don't provide base pay, and their "sales" strategy is simply to robotically hit as many doors as possible until you find the one sucker out of sixty who's just desparate to buy a bunch of toner that day.

They will say that I just "didn't work hard enough" or that I was paid not in money but in "free training" and "opportunity." Of course, I was consistently recognized as one of the top salesmen in the company and hit more doors, and got more sales, than anyone else during my time there, including the "corporate trainers" who had been doing this for years. I just was also smart enough to turn that skill into a REAL sales job that pays REAL commissions at a reputable insurance company, and to see through the nonsense about how I could become a "millionaire" if I bit my tongue for a few more months about the IMI sweatshop.

The last thing that the Cydcor apologist does is claim that he has made $4000 this week selling paper and envelopes to secretaries. Usually this is just a lie told by people who are trained to say anything necessary to get what they want. Sometimes you get a true believer who thinks that, because he's raised $14000 in sales for Quill, he will make his 28% plus web bonus and actually get a $4000 commission. The truth is that he will not; either Quill or Cydcor will steal it from him. When someone claims to be making money at Cydcor, ALWAYS ASK TO SEE HIS PAYCHECK. You don't make anything until it's actually in your bank account, and no one can ever produce evidence of actually being PAID these amounts that they claim they are "making." The person defending IMI today will be busting his a*s trying to get a job as a janitor or a construction worker next week, because you can work a blue-collar job with honor and even minimum wage is better than what Cydcor pays. Ask him to come back to this site in March and tell us what he really thinks of IMI at that time.