I have come across way too many Montrealers involved with phone fraud operations here, which hopefully have all been eliminated by now in a series of high-profile busts and extraditions.
So I took some time away from staring at the ceiling this afternoon to make a list of some of these shady characters.
-The male stripper from Verdun: A thirty-ish welfare recipient who once told me that he was gainfully employed at Club 281 (I didn't go down to check if this was true, although he didn't seem to be a particularly exceptional specimen from the parts I saw).
He strode with the demeanour of a street hustler, was constantly behind on his rent (I was his long-suffering landlord) and had an infuriating habit of paying odd sums here while I was in the middle of doing some fix-it task, that made it difficult to keep an accurate tally on how much he owed. Quite a clever trick really.
One day during a bus strike he asked me to give him a lift to his phone fraud job in Ville St. Laurent. He was quite open about it. I agreed but only if he agreed to help me scrap an old fridge by bringing it downstairs.
The fridge turned out to be an unwieldy 350 lb bastard and both of us were cursing all the way down the three storeys, especially him.
On the drive to his work he brazenly boasted about how he was a particularly good phone fraud guy and would sometimes get the credit card numbers he needed simply by yelling at the old folks who had a hard time understanding his nuanced pitch.
"GET YOUR CREDIT CARD NOW AND READ ME THE NUMBER!" he said was one of his more successful techniques.
When the ringleader was later cited in a media report as having been heard on a wiretap laughing aloud with one particularly ballsy phone fraud guy's quips, I'm getting the sense that it was this guy.
(In case you're wondering why I didn't turn him in, it's because at that point had assumed everything he told me was bullshit).
Swarthy NDG family guy with a sweet local wife and a couple of young kids who I'd see at social gatherings. He'd be there physically at these kiddie events but virtually never stop talking into his bluetooth earpiece phone. So his level of douchiness was pretty much topping out the red arrow on the meter but hell I didn't really care to talk to him anyway.
Things were looking up for this guy upon the surface, he bought a house in NDG and his wife and kids were real sweet but he was arrested and sentenced and there was some sense of trepidation in explaining to the kids where daddy went.
Trashy son of a prince Ever meet someone so sweet and gentle and then meet their kid who is an absolute lout? Well an elderly Liverpudlian grandpa living in an dodgy highway-side upper duplex fit that bill. He was a super guy, quiet and interesting (Told me that Gerry Matticks had financed his home) but his son who worked in a phone joint was loud and fractious with his separation-new-girlfriend-I've-got-the-kid-this-weekend stuff. I have no proof that the younger guy was into phone fraud but a few conversations I overheard might have hinted at that, although he might also have been entirely legit.
One friend-of-a-friend (not on this list) explained his motivation to continue in phone fraud to a mutual acquaintance: "There was a ton of money in it, it was too hard to say no."
So I took some time away from staring at the ceiling this afternoon to make a list of some of these shady characters.
He strode with the demeanour of a street hustler, was constantly behind on his rent (I was his long-suffering landlord) and had an infuriating habit of paying odd sums here while I was in the middle of doing some fix-it task, that made it difficult to keep an accurate tally on how much he owed. Quite a clever trick really.
One day during a bus strike he asked me to give him a lift to his phone fraud job in Ville St. Laurent. He was quite open about it. I agreed but only if he agreed to help me scrap an old fridge by bringing it downstairs.
The fridge turned out to be an unwieldy 350 lb bastard and both of us were cursing all the way down the three storeys, especially him.
On the drive to his work he brazenly boasted about how he was a particularly good phone fraud guy and would sometimes get the credit card numbers he needed simply by yelling at the old folks who had a hard time understanding his nuanced pitch.
"GET YOUR CREDIT CARD NOW AND READ ME THE NUMBER!" he said was one of his more successful techniques.
When the ringleader was later cited in a media report as having been heard on a wiretap laughing aloud with one particularly ballsy phone fraud guy's quips, I'm getting the sense that it was this guy.
(In case you're wondering why I didn't turn him in, it's because at that point had assumed everything he told me was bullshit).
Swarthy NDG family guy with a sweet local wife and a couple of young kids who I'd see at social gatherings. He'd be there physically at these kiddie events but virtually never stop talking into his bluetooth earpiece phone. So his level of douchiness was pretty much topping out the red arrow on the meter but hell I didn't really care to talk to him anyway.
Things were looking up for this guy upon the surface, he bought a house in NDG and his wife and kids were real sweet but he was arrested and sentenced and there was some sense of trepidation in explaining to the kids where daddy went.
Trashy son of a prince Ever meet someone so sweet and gentle and then meet their kid who is an absolute lout? Well an elderly Liverpudlian grandpa living in an dodgy highway-side upper duplex fit that bill. He was a super guy, quiet and interesting (Told me that Gerry Matticks had financed his home) but his son who worked in a phone joint was loud and fractious with his separation-new-girlfriend-I've-got-the-kid-this-weekend stuff. I have no proof that the younger guy was into phone fraud but a few conversations I overheard might have hinted at that, although he might also have been entirely legit.
One friend-of-a-friend (not on this list) explained his motivation to continue in phone fraud to a mutual acquaintance: "There was a ton of money in it, it was too hard to say no."
In the mid-80s I went for a job interview at a place (on St. Antoine or Notre Dame west) that claimed to do surveys and give away prizes over the phone - the big prize they showed me was a camera - but the place just felt off, a little too sleazy.
ReplyDeleteI didn't realize that there was a lot of phone fraud in Montreal.
Les "The Pen Man" Pinsky with his office first in Dollard then in St-Laurent, keeled over of a heart attack before he could be extradited to the US. He would yell at his staff "charge them extra, they'll like it when they get it!"
ReplyDeleteHe had a partner, a real loud mouth schmuck, Warren Stelman, who was later arrested in the Dominican Republic and extradited to the US. He also ran a real estate office to launder cash, with a corny slogan "everything he touches turns to sold". His wife, Lana, also arrested and extradited, was a real biatch of the Nth degree of Cote-St-Luc princesses.
Hey Kristian Swarthy guy - JK ?
ReplyDelete"A ton of money in it", eh?
ReplyDeleteBut who exactly pockets that money? It's the owner-manager, of course, since the employees are quite often recent immigrants desperate for any kind of work and who likely do not speak French well enough (if at all) to qualify for a real, honest job requiring bilingualism.
This is the reason why their "target market" is usually outside of Quebec.
Years ago I remember calling up one of these places to learn exactly what they were selling and being told that it was "all perfectly legal" only to notice a few months later that they had been closed down. Apparently they were selling questionable medical plans over the phone to residents in the U.S.
Sadly, seniors who haven't maintained all of their previous mental faculties fall victim to such devious and even bullying tactics, but then you really have to wonder at the gullibility of presumably-intelligent people and companies who fall for these scams in the first place, for who would buy pens, pencils, and paper rolls over the phone, when such items can easily be bought at the local dollar store?
Other items and products peddled this way include: light bulbs, vitamins, pharmaceuticals, credit/debit card terminals, directories, police membership magazines, and so on.
True, many of the "floor managers" of these scam/sweat shops are real SOBs (or perhaps merely acting that way to "impress") who shout and scream at faltering telemarketers who might stray from their given script, only to turn around and heap praise on those same reps when they make a sale.
These "Jekyll and Hyde", "good cop, bad cop" management techniques are very much in demand by these outfits.
Invariably, the "silent owners" of these rackets are lawyers and other shady businessmen, some of whom are perhaps even linked to the mob.
So how do they sleep at night? The usual reason: take the money and run.
I have a suspicion that many of these mostly Anglo-mother-tongue characters may have had legitimate jobs in the past but eventually found themselves marginalized after Bill 22 and then Bill 101 filtered them out. They simply got their "revenge" by opening up crooked enterprises.
The telephone companies who provide these crooks with their equipment should do their research before allowing themselves to essentially become complicit--if only by association.
I'm still waiting for someone to write a good tell-all book about this wretched industry of phone fraud.
@Urban Legend:
ReplyDeleteI agree! Not that I would ever do that kind of work; however, there are a lot of people like me who couldn't find work in Montreal. I was at the point where I was interviewing at "adult entertainment" companies because it was that or starve. In the end, I opted for a third way and moved to Toronto.
A lot of well-educated young people cannot find work in the city -- sure, people land into a job here and there; but, I find that people my age (in Montreal) are stuck in perpetual youth. You plateau so quickly in Montreal that you never get out of that post-college phase.
I could imagine a scenario where I would have done that kind of work to provide some source of income.
Too many educated and otherwise competent people have been falling through the cracks when attempting to find employment suitable to their talents.
ReplyDeleteI was made aware recently of a highly-educated manager whose job was being "discontinued" and who was then required to re-train less-qualified people to replace himself! Insult to injury!
Not sure if moving elsewhere in the country is the entire solution as there is no guarantee of anything no matter what one decides to do, other than perhaps opening your own small business or finding a partner to help you succeed.