Nice Work If You Can Get It

By CATHY BOOTH HOLLYWOOD

Kirk Smets thought that the classified ad sounded too good to be true. But with no job, three kids and a fourth baby on the way last summer, the 28-year- old plasterer from Palmdale, California, was willing to try anything. The ad from a Florida company called Roblan Inc. described a spectacular offering: a tax-free $70,000-a-year job working on a construction crew overseas. Food, housing and medical expenses were all paid for. The lady at Roblan was enthusiastic. "They said I'd be working on hotels in the Caribbean, the Bahamas," says Smets. "They said I'd be leaving in three to four weeks."

With visions of palm trees and large paychecks dancing in his head, he sent Roblan a $295 fee, told his landlord he'd be moving soon, sold the family furniture and even parted with his cherished dirt bike. He was so confident of a job that he got an out-of-work electrician friend, Roy Allen, and Roy's father to sign up. As soon as the three had paid their fees, however, the trouble started. They say Roblan began evading their phone calls and later reneged on the promises made by the phone-sales staff. Only Roy got a job offer -- which he figured would pay him $5 an hour after expenses -- to work at the North Pole. Repeated demands for a refund went unanswered. "I feel like a stupid idiot," says Roy. "When somebody tells you to get ready and go in a month, you start tying up loose ends."

The Smetses and Allens aren't alone. With jobless rates still at recession levels, unemployed workers from Delaware to Oregon are easy pickings for employment agencies requiring initial fees of $188 to $295 -- and some more than $1,000 -- for access to the "hidden market" of overseas jobs. Many are mere resume services, mailing stacks of unsolicited resumes from their "clients" to companies, often with no openings. Others offer listings available in any public library. In one case, a company promising jobs in Australia collected $164.95 from customers who got a 1989 booklet on jobs, want ads from a Sydney newspaper and a Rand McNally travel video.

Consumer watchdogs say overseas-job scams rake in at least $100 million a year. No one, not even the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), knows for sure. But the trade is so lucrative that even a small-time boiler-room operation with just three phones can take in $5,000 a day. Fly-by-night operators flourish in Florida, where policing is spotty at best. In the past year about 100 employment agencies have sprung up in the state to peddle overseas jobs. Half have already closed.

Although most overseas-job firms operate legally, few deliver on their promises of $70,000-plus jobs in exotic locales. Only an estimated 2% of their + customers ever get a job. Police say refunds are rare. "I'd like to see these guys rot in hell," says Bill Dwyer, a 43-year-old New Jersey electrician who scrounged together $295 after a Florida job agency told him he would have a choice of assignments in Israel, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Australia and Acapulco, Mexico. Out of work for three years, he dreamed of sending his kids to college. "It was all wonderful, wonderful, wonderful, until they got my money. Then, nothing," he says.

To get people to sign up, phone salesmen literally promise callers the world. This year it's the sunny Caribbean. Eastern Europe, Kuwait and Australia were last year's come-on. One man was told his credit-card debt would be paid off; another was assured his employer would fly his dog overseas. A Chicago woman believed an agency that told her Iran was hiring female construction workers. Three construction workers in Decatur, Illinois, thought they had got a real deal with a "buddy package" to work on hotels and casinos in Aruba in the Netherlands Antilles. "What suckers we were," says Alan Berry, a 34-year-old laborer out of work for a year. "It's not like we had the $299 to spare."

Consumer advocate Stuart Rado, a Miami Beach businessman who lost $3,500 to an overseas-job firm in 1981, blames the government for lax policing. "The FTC is impotent to do anything. People don't know where to complain," he says. In the past six months, however, the state attorney general's office has filed civil suit against four companies, including the now defunct Roblan, and is investigating four more firms for deceptive trade practices. Last month the FTC filed a complaint against another Florida operator, the Douglas Co., for allegedly deceiving clients about jobs in sunny foreign climes.

Overseas job agencies deny any wrongdoing, saying they make no promises. "Roblan emphatically does not guarantee jobs," says Roblan's attorney Andrew Cove. Universal Placement Inc., one of the firms sued by Florida, says it provides an honest resume and referral service and claims that job-scam artists are hurting legitimate companies. "We all get painted with the same black brush as companies that run job scams," says Jack Thav, the company's executive vice president.

Although the FTC warns consumers to beware of any company seeking advance fees, even skepticism is sometimes no protection. Randall Deaver, 25, an unemployed sheet-metal worker in Fort Worth, Texas, was leery of promises that he would have a job in Cancun, Mexico, in three months. When he could find no complaints on file with the Better Business Bureau, he and a friend sent a $295 joint fee. All they got for it was the runaround. "I figured it was scam, but I took a chance," says Deaver with a sigh. "The moral is, of course, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is."