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Primerica’s Fake Job Interviews

Primerica Financial Services has become known for offering people “job interviews,” when they are really just having multi-level marketing recruiting meetings.

Here’s one victim’s experience of being asked to show up for a “job interview” that was really a recruiting meeting.

Here’s another victim of the fake job interview technique:

  • As I am currently unemployed and eager to enter the workforce, I jumped at the chance to go to an information session about an employment “opportunity” when invited by an old colleague. When I asked her position, she gave me little info about what she actually did, and told me that they would fill me in when I got there.
  • I sat in the front row for the presentation, overheads charting interest rates, doubling time, the rule of 72, RVP overriding Financial Analysts, $500 each person you switch from Whole insurance to Term Insurance, RRSPs and Mutual funds, Banks are Evil and Greedy.The whole presentation is pretty much a blur.
  • $212.93 will get you trained for the provincial license to sell life insurance.
  • Their Mission is to help families become debt free and financially independent, they called themselves “Crusaders”, Sounds great to me, I am an excellent student. Here’s the thing, they want me to provide 5 names of friends and family so that a “Field Trainer” and I can go to their home and get them to take an RRSP loan, pay off their debt, switch their insurance and invest the difference…and then provide some more names to my field trainer.

And on a related note, it seems that Primerica is now encouraging its new recruits to use a scam of a “character reference” to try to get new victims to recruiting meetings. One guy was duped into giving a “reference” for his friend and was immediately invited to show up for a sample session that would demonstrate whether his friend had the skills to be hired. He had this to say about it:

After hours of deliberation and self-hatred and drinking, I realized the cold, hard truth: I realized that I was never really a “character reference”…I was a potential networking client.

I realized that I was a patsy from the get-go.  Or my friend was.  One or the other.  I realized that during that initial call, I could have lied and rambled on for hours about my buddy’s multiple rape-convictions and his hilarious peyote-habit and his utter disdain for those state-mandated lithium injections.  And you know what?  There’s a 99% chance that the lady would have still said said that I had been a “great help” and that she was “now confident in his abilities” and “oh yeah…by the way, would you be willing to sit through an ‘example presentation’ to give us feedback on blah blah blah?”

The terrible and brilliant deceptiveness of the scam was becoming apparent.  Primerica preyed upon my willingness—my obligation, really—to help a friend in need, and they turned that into a money-making opportunity for themselves.

I had been duped.  Big time.  And I was infuriated.

What a sad, sad way to try to recruit new marks!

 

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4 COMMENTS

  1. My husband and I have a family friend who got suckered into pushing Primerica insurance. I’m not entirely sure how she got into it (I think it was one of her friends who recruited her), but she wanted to give it a go so as to supplement her income. She left it after about a year because she realized that she wasn’t making any of the money she hoped she’d get for the work she was putting into it (and our friend is one of the hardest working people I know!)

    I’m still not sure if she realizes that Primerica is a scam, but I will definitely be referring her to this website so that she won’t get duped again.

  2. Today i was invited to a primerica meeting and i went in there with an ooen mind and to me it seemed like a pyramid scam. Im not sure though. Should i do it or not?

  3. OMG this sounds like Combined Insurance!

    They called for an interview. My mother had worked for Farmer’s Insurance for YEARS and I thought it would be something like that no.

    Oh no, this was a mass interview (red flag #1)
    It turned into a sales pitch (red flag #2)
    They wanted us to take some kind of “test” (red flag #3)

    A girl stood up in the middle of this and proclaimed “This is BS and a waste of my MBA” to which I agreed.

    At the end, the presenter said to call if interested. I was not, so I did not.

    Wouldn’t you know, two days later they asked why I didnt call back. I told them I wasn’t interested. Their response “You didnt score high enough on the test, so we don’t want you anyway!”

    I was waiting for the “neener neener” part. Seriously homie, y’all called ME.

    The lady who was calling and recruiting kept calling me back like every 6 months. I let it go to VM and ignored it, until finally I answered and said to take me off her list or I would file a complaint.

    I got an email a few years later, but other than that, thankfully nothing.

  4. I had an interview with them when I was looking for something that was more flexible. When I got there, It felt really shady. So I didn’t follow through. it was too much like MK for my liking.

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