The Russian owner of Laowai Career Center (Yuri Liesalot) insists he is not a scam but many others like these people at reddit claim to be their victims. See what you think...

REVIEW NO. 1

https://reddit.com/r/ChinaInternships/comments/61eea2/avoid_gi2c_laowai_...

[–]Passenger29 5 points 3 months ago

Yeah, thanks but I found that link two years too late for me. They fucked me in the ass in 2015 and didn't even use vaseline!

BTW... Gi2c & Laowai Career Center are the very same scam people! Both are owned by a Russian couple named Yuri & Svetlana. They also use at least two other names that we know of - Getin2China and Wiseway Global.

I found the many Reddit links and the AbroadReviews.com links 2 years too late! Maybe this is worth a read; https://eslwatch.info/en/eslwatch-forum/china/756-old-russian-gi2c-scam-.... If you sent them a "refundable" deposit, just try to get it back NOW before they shut down or change their name again.

They screwed me under the Gi2c flag 2 years ago. They conned me into quitting my $48K job in Fresno to come make "real money" in China with a public Forex trading company where after I completed an internship, I would earn six figures. They sent me a photo from Global Times newspaper of their 2 dozen interns already earning 6 figures with that company. But after I spent a small fortune moving and settling in Beijing where apartments are $1,500 a month and foreigners have to pay 3 months in advance, I arrived with a positive attitude to begin my new Forex trading career and am slammed on my second day in China with the news that "cooperation with that employer ended two days before your arrival". Instead of calling me to tell me that news they deliberately waited for me to come to China because they knew I would have demanded a refund!

The GF of the Russian owner then told me she would get me in with another "big finance company but it would take a week or so". Two weeks later I am told I should teach English, until they can find me a more suitable job. I guess I believed them because I wanted to. Just like I believed all the reviews and testimonials they showed me. So I agreed to teach English for "no more than 90 days" for $800 a month which did not even cover my living expenses. I then found a better job on my own that paid six times the money, but the Russian owner Yuri told me "I'll pull your visa if you don't finish your teaching contract". I sent him to hell and three days later the China PSB security police came to my apartment and asked to see my passport. Thinking I did nothing wrong I showed it to them and they asked me where I worked. I gave them the name of my new employer and they arrested me saying I was working illegally on an F visa, the one Gi2c arranged for me. I tried to call Yuri while I was being booked at the cop shop but he answered and told me "Sorry smart ass but you have the wrong number!" I then tried to call him back but he had blocked my number.

I spent 32 days in a Chinese jail eating cold rice and noodles every day along with "cha" (tea) before I was allowed to pay my fine and go home to Fresno.

For almost two years I was too embarrassed to tell this story because I was so fucking dumb to fall into the Gi2C well. Now I see they changed their name to Laowai Career Center. When I got scammed a black guy named Chris D.was the Customer Service rep who was the only one who had any empathy for my situation but he said Yuri instructed him not to give any refund to me "unless he shows up with CCTV news crew".

They operate via Skype, We Chat, Facebook, Just Landed and use a shit load of Google Adwords. They got me from an ad at TheBeijinger.com. Don't be fooled people. They are very good at what they do - scamming foreigners who have never been to China before. There is a bunch of stuff about them at scam.com, abroad reviews.com, here http://scamorg.com/laowai-career-center-beijing-amp-hangzhou-china-job-s..., here http://scamorg.com/getin2china-group-81 and this latest one http://opnlttr.com/letter/if-laowai-career-center-not-china-job-scam-the.... Just ask them those questions and see for yourself. And if you look at the dates on everything you will see they have been doing this fraud a loooooong time and get away with it by changing their names every year or two.

REVIEW NO. 2

https://reddit.com/r/ChinaInternships/comments/61eea2/avoid_gi2c_laowai_...

[–]XpatInChina 6 points 3 months ago

I was burned by the Laowai Career Center company which pretends to be based in Hangzhou so angry customers do not accumulate at their Beijing HQ office.

Indeed they will keep their promise to "find you a job placement within 30 days - guaranteed " BUT it will not be the one you wanted nor the one you applied for nor the one you like.

They advertise heavily online and what they advertise are high-paying jobs or jobs that say "travel the world for free" or 'no weekend" or "free furnished apartment included" or "Fortune 500 company needs native-English speaker". All these ads are hogwash. They use these fake jobs to collect a bunch of resumes. That's how they got mine. Yes, they are polite and friendly and even seem helpful. But I realized after I was swindled, they only told me what they wanted me to know. For example, that free furnished apartment came with two roommates and one was a Nigerian chain-smoker, and the other a guy from Pakistan who had Hepatitis and constantly argued with his GF on his cell phone - even at 1:00 am in the morning!

I agreed with LCC to work as a Marketing Manager for a "UK Finance Giant" but turned out to be a telesales job for a small company called Montpellier that the expat people I cold-called said was a scam and angrily said they told Montpelier to stop calling them every month! When I demanded a refund after week one they pushed me to take a job teaching English that paid 10,000 a month, but all the other foreign teachers were getting 15,000. Guess where the other 5,000 was going?

I met two other LCC "clients" and one was offered $1,000 to make a "promotional video" with others but he later said that when he saw the video, they edited it to be a "testimonial" and that he demanded they take it off the internet and they refused. Two weeks later they invited me to a party and I noticed they had a girl and an Indian guy videotaping everything. They got a few drinks in me and then made the very same $1,000 offer to me and I sent them to hell.

In summary, this is a very tricky scam that peddles career dreams based on false images that they create for themselves. I met an employee named Rita and an older man named Stefan at the party and they both write blogs full time for Laowai Career Center saying how great China is to work but they never ever mention any of this here. https://scam.com/showthread.php?704467-UPDATED-China-Liars-List-ESL-TEFL...

Oh, I almost forgot, one of the other "3,000+ satisfied clients" was demanding a list from the Russian owner who started threatening her that he'd get her arrested and deported if she didn't "stop making a scene". She was asking him "to list 10 Fortune 500 companies that LCC works with" because at the orientation on the first day, he boasted that they were "partners with over 100 Fortune 500 and MNCs in China.". When he couldn't answer her and kept changing the subject she started passing out something she copied from the internet about "China's Legal Scams". Here is the link of what she began to pass out.https://scam.com/entry.php?6418-Beware-of-China-s-many-Legal-Scams-like-... The owner took Kay outside of the conference center with another Chinese guy named "Tommy" and I never saw her again. I hope she is okay.

Just the night before Kay was telling us that she found out that the Russian owner also owns some other companies called Getin2China and Wiseway Global Education Group, and Gi2c which according to reddit are all scams too. I can't believe I was so stupid to fall for all their fakery, but I did. Kick me in the ass!

REVIEW NO. 3

https://reddit.com/r/TEFL_TIPS_TRAPS_SCAMS/comments/6mxup7/russian_gi2c_...

[–]Twice_A_Day[S] 7 points 16 days ago

Sorry if you read this before but I am telling my story wherever and whenever I can so more people do not become their next meal. I got totally screwed by this gang as I explained at the r/chinascamcentral sub.

I am naive - not dumb. I thought it was safe to trust other foreigners already working in China. I did not know they were paid to lie for this company. What really hurts is that I quit a $40,000 job to do this because I was offered a job to earn "20,000 a month" teaching quality control standards to Chinese workers. Here is what happened and why I fell for it (you would too).

The company (Laowai Career Center) looks great on the internet but the fancy website is a well-disguised fraud with fake self-written reviews and testimonials they pay tourists and local expat students $500 to make for them. I met one of those expat students who suggested I could make $500 in less than an hour, not knowing I was there to demand a refund.

Laowai Career Center copies and pastes dozens of real ads from other legitimate HR websites and then inserts its own logo. Then they mix in a bunch of fantastic jobs that they make up - like "Earn 20,000 a month in China with a famous Fortune 500 Company working 30 hours per week - furnished apartment included - all travel expenses paid". They use these fake ads to get lots of people to send in their resumes by the hundreds. Those resumes are now sales leads and the job applicants are called and told they are on the "short list". The job I applied for was posted for a month even after they said I was hired, but they deleted it 3 days after I got to China.

A fake interview is then done by Skype where I was told I had the perfect personality and language skills for the job and they even told me they would teach me how to speak Chinese and would earn an extra 5,000 per month once I completed the language training! They told me the man who called me "Todd Walker" was the deputy HR director for HP in China (Hewlett Packard). I now know that no such person works at HP.

I was offered the job and asked to pay a processing and application fee ($299) which they said would be reimbursed on my first pay check. They sent me an original contract which I had to sign and send back to their BEIJING office located on Zhongguancun Street - yet they tell everyone their office is in Hangzhou! They also tell everyone they have been doing business for "almost 10 years" but their website registration proves they are lying (2014 registration). So I quit my $40,000 job as a KFC manager and fly to Beijing. I was told I would get a free apartment so I made no arrangement nor had extra money for a hotel. There was no free apartment because they gave me some "bad news" that because of "political tensions over the South China Sea" HP decided not to hire any more foreigners for at least a year! But they then try to ease the pain by getting me to teach Engish to 6-8-year-old kids in some chain school for a ridiculous salary equal to $1,200 per month!

I demanded to meet the owner of the company but the reception girl said the employees were "forbidden" from giving that name. I then found it on the internet - and it is not a Chinese person, but a Russian guy linked to five other China scams all over the internet... http://tefl.net/forums/viewtopic.php?

t=7589&p=18289 This morning my sister sent me these two links which I never saw because I was too busy reading all the links to the fake testimonials sent to me by the Laowai Career Center rep Linda (a Chinese girl who would not tell me her full Chinese name). http://opnlttr.com/letter/laowai-career-center-189-other-black-scam-agen... and also this one here which shows the previous scams of the Russian owner http://eslwatch.info/en/eslwatch-forum/china/756-old-russian-gi2c-scam-a...

When I finally tracked down the office which has a sign in front that says "Gi2c China Internships" I met two girls who went there to pick up fake diplomas they said they were told they needed to work in China and they paid $1,500 each for them. Apparently, this company also sell fakes documents. I told the police everything and they said they will investigate. I am not holding my breath.

Here is the really devious part... They told me to lie on my visa application to say I was coming over to China to do "research on Chinese culture". They could not give me a Z visa but gave me an M visa instead which is only good for 90 days. So when I went to demand a refund, I threatened to call the cops and they said "go ahead - you are in China illegally without a Z visa and you will be arrested - not us!". I consulted a lawyer at the embassy and she said they were right. They set up this brilliant scam perfectly to trap people. And because they are in China, no foreign government can prosecute them.

When I told everything to the Chinese police, they were more amused than anything and I heard one say "Too many dumb foreigners come to China". When I asked him to explain he just shook his head, laughed, and said at least 20 people a week tell them much the same story, but no victim is willing to stay in China the three months it would take to make a claim in the Chinese courts and hire a bilingual Chinese lawyer for $5,000. Shit, it would cost me another $5,000 just to stay in Beijing for those three months. Like I said, these scammers got all of their bases covered."

And, methinks I am not the only one! https://reddit.com/r/Scams/comments/61wni8/only_10_of_all_china_job_ads_...

As for the other 33 reviews, you will find them at these links here:

http://scamorg.com/laowai-career-center-beijing-amp-hangzhou-china-job-s...

http://scamorg.com/laowai-career-center-china-job-scam-8d

http://scamorg.com/getin2china-group-81

http://scamorg.com/gi2c-org-38

We have our own opinion as well, but we spent 6 months investigating them and interviewed 3 of their former employees and 5 of their victims. Here is the report we wrote with exclusive photographs too:

https://chinascampatrol.wordpress.com/2015/04/25/is-gi2c-china-internshi...

A fews years ago,after many students in the UK were getting cold calls and emails. This appeared on the largest student web site in the UK:

https://thestudentroom.co.uk/showthread.php?t=3227459

Then someone wrote this adorable poem about the company that shares their sentiments in a humorous way;

http://gi2ccomplaints.blogspot.com/

But these are what other people think. What do YOU think do you agree with this fellow from realsca,.com, forum or do you think differently?

http://realscam.com/f51/scam-alert-lawaoi-career-center-old-sophisticate...

It is your own opinion that matters most so if you get called by a sales rep from Laowai Career Center, Gi2c, WiseWay Global, or Getin2China, politely ask them the following questions and see how they do:

1) What is your SAIC business license number?

2) What is the SAIC business license number of my prospective employer?

3) Is it true or false that your Chinese employee "Tommy" was arrested for visa fraud?

4) Is it true that your former webmaster Steve Brown from the UK resigned when he discovered most of the job ads he was positing were fabricated?

5) Can you list the "top 500 universities" you have cooperation with?

6) Can you list even a dozen Fortune 500 companies your sales people claim to be working with on a daily basis in China?

7) How many of your old Gi2c employees now work with Laowai Careers Center including Ben, Vivian, Mary, and Chris?

8) Do you deny or can you explain why your main office is in Beijing yet you publicly list only your shared office space in Hangzhou?

9) How many of your clients asked for refunds in the last year and why did you suddenly stop charging an up-front fee right after a TV news reporter wanted to visit your office in Beijing?

11) How many of your clients were REALLY placed with Fortune 500 companies in the last 5 years?

12) How many of your clients were REALLY placed with an international MNC company in the last 5 years?

13) Is it true you placed a tall Italian girl with a scam company that got busted by the police and CCTV news for selling fake luxury products?

14) Why did your French client Winnie Maliko post all those negative comments about you and your company on the internet when it was revealed you were paying people to give false video testimonials about you that you use on your websites?

15) Can you please publicly answer these questions and a rebuttal to these three posts we found about your many companies:

https://eslwatch.info/en/forum/china/756-old-russian-gi2c-scam-artist-is...

http://realscam.com/f51/warning-gi2c-china-internship-just-another-china...

https://eslwatch.info/en/forum/china/117-fraud-warning-gi2c-and-other-ch...

http://abroadreviews.com/fraud-alert-laowai-career-center-cheats-uni-gra...

https://scam.com/entry.php?6481-Fraud-Warning-Gi2c-Getin2China-amp-Laowa...