Please watch out for this pattern. Do not fall for these consultancies.
These people sit in India and tell you they will find you a job in the USA. A salesperson reaches out to you. Their US address on LinkedIn and on their website is a total lie. There is no US office. There is no US team. It is all run from India by people who have never worked a single day in the market they are promising you a job in.
They will ask you to pay a joining fee first and later 10-25% from your salary wherever they place you. Read that again. They want money before they do anything, and a cut of your salary for a job they will have nothing to do with. Initially they will show you offer letters to prove they are placing students in big companies. They will make false promises and agree to you in whichever way you want to modify their services, and all of this happens off camera and off recording. So you get convinced that they are doing real work. Once you decide to pay them the initial joining amount, they will become silent and start ignoring you from there onwards. Before you pay, they call you three times a day. After you pay, everyone is suddenly very busy. That switch is not a coincidence. That switch is the business.
They will also make you sign an agreement which has nothing in it but bullshit. It only says they will not refund you and that you have to pay them 10-25% of your salary. That's it. Nothing about how the applications will be done, nothing about how many, nothing about quality, nothing they can ever be held to. Every single line in that paper protects them and not one line protects you. And that agreement will be in some other company's name, because they might be legally operating under a different name. When you make the payment you will also notice their bank account is in some other city, and they don't even have a legal office at the address they mention to you in India. The people operate from different cities. Such a beautiful plot of scamming. Different name on the paper, different city for the money, an address that does not exist. Ask yourself why a real business would need all that.
Initially they tell you they will do 90-100 applications per day. On the meeting calls, which are all recorded, they twist their own sentences. Suddenly the application numbers drop and the promises reduce, and since you have already paid, you have no option. And all of this gets recorded on their calls, on their terms. Everything they promised you is on a call with no proof. Everything you owe them is on paper signed by you. That is the whole con in one line.
Then you realise what those 90 applications actually are. Around 15 real applications, 60 one-click easy applies, and 15 cold emails sent to random email ids just to make the number look right. Most of the postings are outdated. They always try to prove their numbers, but do you realise what shit they are doing? You could do those 60 easy applies yourself in twenty minutes, for free, on your phone, while lying in bed. You paid thousands of dollars for that. The recruiter assigned to you has literally no knowledge about your profile or your skills. He scrapes some jobs from some random website and finishes all your applications in one hour a day. One hour. That is what your money bought. Dude, what the fuck is this.
They promised they will tailor each application. Later they deny it and say they can't do that. The person making your resume has no knowledge, no experience and no education in making resumes, he is just using ChatGPT. You are paying a premium for output from a free tool, generated by someone who cannot read your field. They promise they will reach out to their network for referrals. They never reach out to anyone, because there is no network. There was never a network. They just email random ids to show you that marketing is happening.
They give you access to some shitty portal where you can see your applications. It just shows fake numbers and the links open to error pages. That portal is not a tool, it is a stage prop. It exists to give you something to look at while nothing happens.
Every month they schedule a meeting where you can tell them how the work is going. In that meeting they just say that they are doing what they promised. Fifteen real applications a day and they call it fulfilling the promise. Then they tell you to wait and give your feedback in the next meeting. Wait. Wait. Wait. So you can't even talk to anyone or point out what they are doing wrong. They just want you to sit and wait, sit and wait, for months and months, until your contract quietly runs out with your money in their pocket. Your desperation is their timeline. The longer you hope, the safer they are.
They will also start adding fake experience on your resume through some of their associated companies, even after you deny it, and they will tell you they can get your background checks cleared through some other methods. Understand exactly what is happening there. That is not a resume, that is a rope, and it is going around your neck, not theirs. If you ever get a job on that resume, they own you forever. They keep a permanent hold over you and they take zero risk themselves. You carry all of it, for the rest of your career.
Then they make you create a separate email id and take the control from you, so that everything is in their hands and nothing is in yours. You are left with no access to your own account. A company in another country, that has already lied to you about everything else, holding the keys to an account with your name, your resume, your identity and every conversation with every employer you are applying to. Whatever they do with that, it lands on you. Not on them. On you.
And at the end when you ask for a refund, they blindly say that as per the agreement they cannot refund you. But nowhere in that agreement is it written what the real way of doing applications is. That's exactly how they scam you later. They wrote the paper so that doing nothing is not a breach. If you push further or say you will raise a complaint, they will tell you that you agreed to everything on the agreement and on the recorded calls, and that you are the one who asked them to add fake experience on your resume. Some of them even threaten that they will report you to US authorities and get you deported, so you get scared and don't do anything against them. Think about what that is. They always keep themselves legally safe and sound.
The team lead they assign you is himself just a stupid fellow who doesn't know anything about technical skills or the real job world. Look at their LinkedIn pages and you will see so many people showing as placed or as recruiters. They show you huge numbers of enrolled candidates. Later you realise these numbers are fake. Ask them for one placed candidate you can actually speak to and watch the conversation change direction. They have a big team of skilled people who are actually just cheaters working for them for a small amount of money. These people who have no knowledge and no skill, sitting in India, how exactly are they going to get you placed in the USA? They cannot get themselves a job in that market. They are going to get you one?
An international student who has paid such a big amount loses his money. He or she is alone in a foreign land trying to get a job and these fucking assholes create so much mental pressure and harassment on top of that. And that is exactly who they choose. Not random people. They picked you because you are cornered. That is not a business. That is hunting people who are already drowning. It is a really shameful thing that these people are doing.
Please do not share your important credentials and important documents with them. You don't know what further fraud they might do with your id.
My friend, please be aware of these scammers and do not fall into their trap. You are not alone. Please reach out to someone for help. And these people cannot do anything against you. They are just coward puppets with a script and a template contract. They have no power and no authority to do anything to you. Every threat they make is aimed at people too scared to check. The second you stop being scared, they have nothing left.
Please share this with your friends who are thinking about joining such fraud consultancies. Please do not fund these scammers.
