Madison Who's Who -- I worked for these people. They told lied to me about what the job entailed. Their sales pitch instructed me to make purposely misleading statements. This is a scam and I feel terrible that I parti Internet

The management at Madison Who's Who knows they are perpetrating a scam. Their hiring practices are extremely misleading and meant to keep new hires in the dark until they are on the phone. At that point you have already invested 3 days of time and effort to this job and become conflicted about quitting. However, it becomes quickly apparent that what you are doing on the phone is scamming people out of their money.

New "editors" (as the company refers to them, the rest of us would say telemarketers) are brought in every week and put through a 3 day training course. The training course consists of learning a scripted sales pitch which includes rebuttals to every concern a potential customer might have. Most of the sales pitch and rebuttals are extremely misleading, and possibly bald faced lies. The training entirely consists of learning the scripted pitch and learning to read it without sounding like you are reading. I did sign a non-disclosure agreement so I am not currently comfortable going into details. If I was provided some kind of immunity I would be more than happy to nail these bastards: I felt so terrible when I left work. I scammed a good man out of his hard earned money and it was not right. I quit after 6 hours on the phone.

The sales pitch makes misleading statements and pressures the customer to purchase an expensive membership on impulse. The customer never receives any information about what he is purchasing until after he has spent his money and given his credit card information out. I was told that if the customer asks for information on the product he should be denied according to a scripted rebuttal because a customer who wavers does not want to buy. This is not true, a customer wavers because he wants to give informed consent. Madison Who's Who would not survive if their customers were fully informed. You should fully inform yourself before you spend $700 or more with a company. The customer is continuously led to believe that he has been especially selected for an honor, but this is also not true. I am not sure how email lists are made but, essentially, Madison Who's Who spams people until someone falls for it and responds. There is no selection committee or process of any sort as both the emails and sales pitch lead customers to believe. Once you reply they have your name and you will receive calls until you either decide to buy or die. I was told that I would not be making cold calls, that customers on the list had already expressed interest in the company but this is not precisely the truth. The sales pitch begins with a warm-up period where the customer is invited to share biographical information on the pretense that this information will form his profile in the publication. Of the information I collected, less than 30 words total were included in the finished biographical profile, at a cost of some $600. The customer is also told that even if he does not choose to buy he will still receive a basic listing with the who's who. I was told during training, point blank and flat out, that this was a lie.

In order to maintain an employee base Madison Who's Who scams its new hires also. Of my training class more than half had already quit by the time I did, and I know of others who have since. The company has a boiler-room culture and new hires are sold on this. We were told that we would be calling people who had asked for the call, when in truth they had just responded to a highly misleading and deceptive spam email. We were told that we would be contacting CEOs and C-Level Executives exclusively when, in truth, there were Elementary School Vice Principals, College Students, and many other average joes on the list; we were expected to scam the type of people for whom $700 makes a major difference, and that is wrong. We were given as little information as possible on the actual product because the truth is there essentially is no actual product. For $700 one receives lifetime access to a database which is exactly equivalent to LinkedIn only with many fewer members, a piece of paper or plaque, and a book which is printed in-house to include some selection of past members. A $199 charge is added to new accounts for which is received a CD which contains the exact same information which can be found on the online registry. There are also some frills, including the airline tickets which come with heavy stipulations. We were not told any of this beforehand but instructed to "get that money any way you can."

I did not know this was a scam until I put it into action. I'm so sorry to everyone I called and especially to anyone who bought something from me. I was desperate for a job, still am, and I was too desperate to bother to do my research before I accepted. My father taught me to make an honest living, and I have been ashamed of myself ever since I did this. If you are called by Madison Who's Who your best bet is to slam the phone down immediately.