Complaint Review: Whiz Fish

Whiz Fish's Brian Grinonneau advertises for appointment setters on Craigslist. I sent my resume and he was quick to respond. I did not have a home phone, and the BBB warned me against this company since they had no info on them whatsoever. Being desperate for a job, I borrowed money to buy a phone and get a home phone line for this job.

The way it works is this: you call and set appointments for Brian's salespeople(I suspect he is the main salesperson), and any actual sales result in a commission of $75. Brian's claim is that 70% of appointments result in sales.

In the first three days I set 9 appointments - a very high number, according to him, for a beginner. About 6 of those were appointments FOR the first three days(the other two were for Thursday and Friday). Amazingly, not one of those 6 appointments resulted in a sale. On Thursday, as was the norm each day, I called to turn in my appointments and see if any sales had been made that day. No answer. I left two messages. No calls back. I called Friday and left a message saying I was concerned - it was unusual not to get a call, and I was getting a little worried. No call back.

On TUESDAY of next week, he called and left a message simply saying to call him back - no explanation, apology, or anything. I tried to call back twice and got no answer - also very unusual. He was clearly avoiding me.

The next day I checked my e-mail and had an e-mail stating that I had been terminated because "the quality of my appointments was poor." I've done telemarketing for years and was always known for having one of the highest return rates of anyone in the office, at multiple places - by return, I mean, people who actually paid up instead of promising to and then not delivering. Now, suddenly, an average, according to him, 70% sales rate on 9 appointments turned up no sales whatsoever because my appointments were poor? I had appointments with companies like Barry's Bagels, whom he said he had done advertising for in the past - he couldn't sell them? I've always had a very high sale rate, I was reading his sales pitch word for word, explaining everything to these people, and not a single sale?

And then he suddenly won't return calls, etc? I'm sure there was at least 1 sale with one of those. Effectively he caused a bankrupt person to borrow money to work a job so that he could rip him off. Now I'm even more in debt, and he doesn't even have the common courtesy to return a phone call.

I called some of the people back and they said nobody even showed up. I suspect what he does is get people to set up a bunch of appointments simply to generate leads for him. He then waits a few weeks till those people forget and the employee is fired, sets up new appointments with those leads, and pockets the cash.

If you go to the Whiz Fish website and do a reverse lookup on the local phone number, you'll find it's not even registered to him - it's some woman's name, and the address is someone's home. In other words, this guy is just running some operation out of his girlfriend's house, his "office" is her living room, and he hires people to set appointments until he senses they're getting suspicious, then he cuts them loose telling them their work quality was poor.

Richard
Sylvania, Ohio
U.S.A.