I was fresh out of college so was very susceptible to anyone calling for an interview invite. Got a call from a company I didn’t recognize and I was too innocent to not question how they even got my number. I dressed up and everything, brought my resume, etc. When I arrived, there was a bunch of us and then there was a presentation.

Yep, you guessed it, it was an MLM. It was the mid 2000s, so it wasn’t really well known as an MLM or pyramid scheme at the time. Hell, I couldn’t even understand why I was sitting through a presentation and not doing an interview. I realized it wasn’t a job when they started asking for money to commit. Barely 20 me still didn’t realize it’s a scam, but fortunately I literally had no money so couldn’t offer anything either way lol. After a lot of prodding, they finally let me go if I wrote down the names and number of 5 people I know. Then I realized that’s how they got my number. Someone in my circle went through the same thing and gave my contact info away.

I spent 1 hour of unpaid work experience for a telephone provider. I found out on the day that I would be handing out pamphlets in a supermarket.

The person who was supposed to be helping and/or supervising just gave me the pamphlets and walked off to chat with his girlfriend. The only time he intervened was to tell me off for answering a potential customer’s question. I knew the answer, but I was supposed to defer to him (not that he told me beforehand) so that he could sugar coat (read - lie about) the answer.

I never went back, and tell all my friends to avoid that company. I’ve since discovered that they also do many illegal things to get more money from their customers, but will suddenly comply if you know your rights so that they never get caught.

I sold student loan forgiveness for about 2 weeks in my early 20s (circa 2010ish), the first of which was “training”. When I actually looked at the terms of the program and the associated interest rates, I told my buddy that got me in that he was a scumbag and walked right out.

I worked for a vanity publisher that would publish literally anything you sent to them. But you had to buy all of the books yourself. They did nothing to help promote your book. They would cold ship books to bookstores along with a bill, most either refused the shipments, or dumped them.

I did the layout for children’s books. And let me tell you, when I say they would publish anything I mean anything. There was a book about snails, but none of the “snails” had shells, and they all looked like penises. There were a couple kids science books that were factually incorrect. We were not allowed to correct or change anything.

Way back I worked at a call center for “Explore Talent”. We were located in Oregon but had to tell everyone we were in LA. They even had the LA weather forecast written on the board so we could comment on the weather. Super slimy job taking advantage of desperate people giving them false hope for money. I didn’t last the month.

I interviewed for one. It’s was an “electric company” which offered people a “better rate” on their bills. It was a variable rate that wasn’t guaranteed to ever be lower overall.

I went to an interview for Life Insurance sales. once the initial interview was over I was sent into a conference room where other interviewees joined me and we were pitched the idea of becoming life insurance sales-people which required studying, testing, and licensing which they insisted we all payed for ourselves. After a 20-minute pitch by some d-bag with frosted tips said “Growing up I always dreamed of owning a Maserati, after my success joining this company I drive a Maserati!” The moment he was done talking I got up, turned left and went out the emergency exit. I still associate d-bags with Maserati driver and that was close to twenty years ago.

The usual: in college, desperate for work in a saturated college-city market I worked for Vector Marketing selling Cutco knives–one of the more humilating periods of my life–and interviewed for several other “jobs” that turned out to be MLM sales (e.g., I think a knockoff perfume company called “observe l’essence”?). I also tried to sell cars. Holy shit the people I worked with were horrible humans (except 1.5 of them).

In a slightly less horrible vein I spent a summer (late 90s) in a call center for BellSouth.net, which mostly consisted of telling people to type their passwords in very carefully or reboot their computer. When someone found out I spoke Spanish I was given all Spanish, Portuguese, and even Italian customers, and released from all quotas and average call time metrics. This was good, because trying to work out what a Brazilian customer was saying on the phone was hard enough, but Italian (and maybe one time Romanian)? Took hours.

Oh, the scammy part of that was minor: we were in a faceless warehouse on the outkirts of Columbus, Ohio, but we were instructed to always keep websites open for Atlanta, GA and to talk about the weather, sports, etc. and pretend we were in Atlanta.

The oddest part of that job was that our floor of the warehouse/call center was shared with a brand new and kind of weird company that had just started running TV ads: priceline.com. We had breaks with priceline employees on a regular basis.

You mean besides, um… ^{checks notes} Oh, pretty much anything in this timeline?

Yes.

If you’d like to come to my free one hour seminar, I can tell you all about it.

Why, are you planning to set something up?

Well, I went through a recruitment process for a Ponzi scheme company. It was wild, but the first filter was an interview by some “hot” woman (sorry, I was like 21) so, I guess I was nervous and passed to the next part of the recruitment process. This third part (the first was only a couple of documents) was frankly nauseous for my kind of education, in this phase, a proper brainwash about how unions, worker rights and health insurance are just obstacles between us and real success in life and some other nonsense, happened to a group of applicants clearly infiltrated. At that exact moment I wanted to go home, but somehow I was feeling unsafe surrounded by the staff (people, I guess, already in the Ponzi scheme). They wanted us to come back the next day to sell perfumes for free or to buy them perfumes to sell by ourselves or something. Of course, I didn’t come back, but it was traumatizing.

Oh, actually, /u/bobbyfiend, already mentioned the same kind of “business”, except this is Mexico. It’s not rare to find these “ideas” being deployed in several countries, like Scientology.

Yes. Our company did hosting and IT support for an esoteric online book store.