 Today is an interesting day because I've chosen to share one of the more interesting stories of my time in Israel here. Clearly I've been using the latest cutting edge identity masking techniques to disguise my identity and we're also recording this in an undisclosed location. All we can say is that the location is a field in the greater Jerusalem Israel or really we can't say that recording this on a field somewhere in Israel. So I thought I'd talk a little bit about one of my alia war stories so to speak. It was about the second year that I was in Israel and I just finished up with the first job, I was between jobs, moving apartments, getting used to the place and all that stuff and I saw this ad on Facebook. The ad was for customer service representatives. It's not the type of thing I typically do as a career, my day job is working in marketing communications but it seemed to me like a fine job as I was looking for a more permanent job. It was advertised as like this call center or something needs customer service reps right to this email address if you're interested. The first red flag and this is either red flags for anyone trying to avoid these kind of operatives is it was a Gmail address. I didn't think too much of it at the time but you know in retrospect that was a bit dodgy. So I went right to this Gmail address and I get in touch with this person. Now what's weird is that the person, the name on the advertisement was let's say it was a woman right? So let's say the name was Sarah, I'm just making up a name. So I get this call but it's at like 2 in the morning. So I'm woken up in bed by a phone call, doesn't happen that frequently and I'm like who's this? So the first, the second thing that didn't really match up was that she gave a different name. It was the job calling me back and I was like you know it's 2 in the morning are you based in Israel? And she's like yeah we're based in Israel. So that was a bit strange that they thought that it was like normal to call up candidates at like the small hours in the morning. Let me cut to the chase of the story. So she calls me and she's like we should set you up for a job interview. So she chooses the following morning and another weird sign is that she wants to meet in a cafe. So at this point I don't know the name of the company. I only know they have a GML address. The recruiter seems to be operating from like two or three different identities and we've decided to meet in a kind of shitty cafe. So it's starting to get a bit more interesting. Anyway roll forwards to the next day and I go to meet in this cafe. So I'm meeting this lady and I'm like oh you're Sarah. She responded that that wasn't her name. So now you have three different names. Anyway she tells me that basically it's a moving company. So finally the details or the faint details of what this operation is about begin to become transparent. And she said that this was like a call center. They help people to move their belongings between different places in the U.S. She tells me there is a training cohort starting on the next day. Red flag four and stuff moves really really quickly. My experience can be a bit of a red flag in its own race. So she tells me there's a training cohort so I agree. We have our coffee. I'm going to go our separate ways. The next day I'm trying to find this training cohort and trying to find their office. It's located in a building in central Jerusalem where there is a bunch of other normal businesses. There's like a Burlitz language school and there's you know other stuff. So I can't find their office. So I call the number and they're like it's to the left of the travel agent. So I look for a travel agent and to the left is the only door on the floor which doesn't have any signage. There's nothing. It's just like a wooden door. So again I'm like what the hell is this place? This is weird. So the details are starting to... I'm beginning to get the feeling I'm going into some sort of a scorn business. So anyway I go in there and there's this trainer guy. He's a very very well-spoken guy but immediately begs the question what are you doing? He said he had an advanced scientific degree. What are you doing working in a moving call center? What the hell am I doing working in a moving call center? That's another question. And then I notice on the whiteboard. The office has a whiteboard and it has today's weather in New Jersey. 19 degrees, sunny, you know the symbols. And then there's like tomorrow's weather, high of 20 degrees or whatever that is in Fahrenheit. So I've mentioned before I'm a big fan of Simona Wineblast's reporting in the times of Israel. She's done an amazing job in reporting on the binary forex scum. I tried to get her interested in the story. She says there's not enough details about it. Hence why I'm sitting in a park in an anonymous mask telling the story myself. Okay so we go in there, there's this, the weather forecast is on the door so I'm like what the hell is that about? The other weird thing is that when the training starts there's only one other attendee, right? So they made this big social media push, they're sponsoring odd. And I'm like how is this that in a city of one million people, it's me and this other dude, we are the training cohort. The other guy also it's worth noting seems kind of a bit strange. He mentioned some weird story about being in London and a guy chased him with an off. At this point I'm getting this kind of feeling that I stepped into some sort of a matrix like world where we are the infection or wavy. So the training starts and we're learning to use a CRM. Now people who have worked in the world of sales or marketing probably know a CRM, it's like Salesforce. It's a computer program where you put in the leads of your customers and whatever. The weird thing about this one was that to me it looked very, very custom coded. This was not a Salesforce or a pipe drive. This was something that they made themselves. It's all these crazy calculations. The training consisted of us basically the story they were selling was that there is a moving company. They're based in the US. We're based in Israel. People will get quotes from the website. They'll fill out, I want to move my stuff from Florida to New York and we get the leads. So we get the leads and we have this call with the customers. And he's training us what to do. So the guy says, and I'll never forget this, he says, the first thing you have to say is, in your mind, invite me to your house. Pretend I am in your house. What do you see? Do you see a dining room? Do you see, and it went on like this and this, and I was like, this is odd, right? Eventually it's time for Drake, so I go out to get some like falafel and water and what have you. And at this point, I'm kind of connecting the dots of what this thing is about. So I put into Google Israeli moving squams. The guy led on the name of the company. The company had about four different names because like all these squam operations, it's constantly trying to, it's a game of cat and mouse with the authorities. Another thing that's big in the world of borax and binary is that this whole thing of companies being based in the US, but actually operating from Israel, it makes it very hard to prosecute this kind of white collar crime. So I knew all this when I was searching. The name of the company that they gave in the training session came up and it was hundreds and hundreds of negative reviews on Yelp.com saying this place is a scum. I later found out that Israeli moving companies, there's a lot of Israeli movers in the US and a portion of them are fraudulent operations. I'm not saying they're all fraudulent. When I started digging into the reviews on Yelp about this company, the place whose training center I was just in with no wooden door, it started making sense. They said firstly, the people got changing their names, which definitely matched up with my experience. The second thing is they said they're based in some foreign country, but they seem to know the weather really well. I was like, well, yeah, they have it on their whiteboard. The third thing, and this is really what connected, they said, I got a quote, they came in with a super low ball offer that was very, very inviting. But when my goods arrived on the truck in Florida, wherever the move was to, I got this crazy, crazy invoice. Effectively, what was going on was a form of extortion. The customer, the victim, scum victim in the US, would send in a moving request form to this lead posture website. That would come into these people sitting in Israel. And our job, when we were asked to tell us about your living room, do you have a bed? Does the bed have cushions? Does the bed, does the bed have legs? Does your dining table have legs? All that stuff was because we were being trained to enter every single thing into our custom CMS. So they think, so they're getting a bill for like $500 for your table, $100 times five for each leg, and jacking up the quotes. And then we were effectively holding their goods hostage on a moving truck in the US. Those are the details as I piece them together. That's why the scum is in Israel. I think it's one of the smallest scum industries here. There's probably four or five. I don't know if this was a major operator of the scum or a small operator, but everything I read online meticulously matched the details what I experienced. I came back into the training center and that was my first and last day on shift because I realized it was a scum. And I said I'm going to be looking for other opportunities. That's my story of spending a couple of days in the scum industry in Israel. I've had a couple of interesting experiences. And perhaps I'll come back to this undisclosed location to share a couple of those more.