Complaint Review: David Werner International - New York New York

Hopefully you are reading this before you sign an agreement with David Werner International. I paid him $37,000.00 and today I am still looking for employment. After 12 months of listening to David Werner and his claims, he produced no interview, no leads.zero results. Looking back it is quite clear - David Werner International is a scam!

Like all scams, it operates with little or no competition. Joann Lublin, in her January 5, 2009 article entitled High-End Help for Job Hunters: Does It Pay? which was published in The Wall Street Journal, uncovers an interesting fact. The pay-for-job market players is a very small group, Joann lists three payers. Like all scams, David Werner International operates in this small community outside of the competitive world of contingency or retained employment agency world where he can't compete and where he can't scam. In the competitive world of employment agency, the business model is clear and it is fair. If they find you a new assignment they get paid, if they don't they get nothing Heads I win, tails I lose! That is why retained agencies will not accept new clients if they deem difficult to place these client.

In the world of David Werner International the difficulty of placing a client is irrelevant because David Werner gets paid upfront. Mind you, that is not what he will tell you! He will convince you that he makes money from the placement fee, that is the fee based on your annual salary and which you agree to pay after you accept the new job. This is clearly not true, very much like everything else you will hear from Werner.

At your first face to face meeting with David Werner, he will look you over and determine how much you are worth. From that he will figure out the upfront fee. That initial fee is comprised of all his costs associated with the busy work he will provide, i.e. mailing, websites access, databases, etc. The other and most important component of the initial fee is his profit. From that point on the scam is complete. If you get a job David Werner gets additional money and if you don't David Werner got his cost covered and already got his profit Heads he wins, tails you lose!

Like all scams he will convince you that the laws of probability do not apply to David Werner International. He will convince you that all of his clients find a new job. He will convince you that the Werner Letter will make some company create a new job for you. He will try to convince you that a personal website will help your image after all; he will convince you that David Werner International is an expert marketing professional particular in the new media, Internet.

The reality is very different. David Werner International had absolutely no Internet presence until early 2008. If you search on Google for information prior to late 2007 and early 2008, you will discover that David Werner and David Werner International was a stealthy operation. The only reason David Werner International started to spend money on Internet is to attempt to counter the avalanche of negative posting which started at the end of 2007.

Many scammed clients of David Werner International discovered several website where they could expose this scam. This forced Werner to initiate many so called Press Releases on numerous websites to try to counter the explosion of complaints and negative posting. That is what forced him to muster all his marketing might to get Joann Lublin to write High-End Help for Hobs Hunters: Does It Pay article in The Wall Street Journal. Fortunately, his effort backfired because Joann made an effort to be relatively objective and her writing exposes the fact that Certain Werner clients are unhappy.

If the laws of probability apply to Werner the same way they apply to the rest of the universe, certain Werner Clients translate to a large percentage of Werner clients, particularly in this employment market. The clients who get scammed by David Werner are in many ways like Madoff's clients who believed that the laws of stock market probability do not apply to Madoff or themselves. David Werner's clients believe that Werner can find jobs for all of his clients regardless of the economy or the simple fact that David Werner is ignorant of the effect Internet has had on the employment agency business.

Like Madoff, David Werner creates an exclusivity aura claiming to only accept a certain number of clients with high salary employment history. Looking for people with a high salary history is easy to understand. These people have money and believe they are better and more deserving than the rest. They are also less likely to fight back and expose the scam.

The claim of only accepting of a limited number of clients is dubious at best. David Werner has made verbal claims of eight clients per months. In Joann's article Werner claims only four clients per month. It is difficult to exactly know how many clients David Werner scams monthly. The exact number is actually irrelevant. What is relevant is the fact that Werner is always stating some small number which creates the aura of exclusivity and feeds the psychology of making his scam desirable.

Regardless, for every Werner client the results are the same Heads he wins, tails you lose!

J. D.

New York, New York

U.S.A.