With recent revelations that some shady and unclicensed TEFL job recruiters have become Reddit moderators only to supplement their own real-life incomes recruiting foreign teachers to work illegally with fake diplomas, phony TEFL certificates, and without the proper work visas in China, real teachers with real experience and qualifications have united to give every TEFL teacher a global map of the TEFL minefield. They have started their own TEFL SCAMS sub at Reddit where teachers traveling abroad to teach can warn one another of lurking black hagwons in Korea and blacklisted schools, dodgy job agents, identity thieves posing as recruiters, and recruiters known to skim 30%-60% of teacher's salaries with illegal contracts in China. The new sub can be found at http://reddit.com/r/TEFLscams.
So far, 25 warnings have been posted with links to various videos and blacklists of hundreds of problem employers around the world. This sub was created after it was learned that even a convicted felon was one of the moderators at the huge "Teachers" sub and was using the sub to lure new users into her recruitment net. The complete story can be found here: https://www.reddit.com/r/teaching/comments/6plxp3/one_esl_job_recruiter_...
This was not the first time recruiters were found lurking as moderators at Reddit as well as ESLCafe. http://opnlttr.com/letter/reddit-mods-include-china-job-agents-hiding-tr... and as censorship of factual information grew worse and worse to make it easier to recruit teachers for China, some users said "Enough!" and created this new sub without a single recruiter mod, and great efforts are being made to exclude almost 30 sock puppet users known to be linked to their "fishing expedition".
The 10+ tefl job recruiters residing on Reddit have reacted in anger and have vindictively visited and down-voted every single post in the new sub with what is known as a "brigade" using their sock puppet accounts to minimize the profile of the posts which originally skyrocketed with 96% approval ratings that they knocked down with their sabotage to 58% within a day.
Gregg Finch, a do administrator of the China Foreign Teachers Union commented on the current status quo by saying "At present, these unethical recruiters masquerading as moderators are using the trusted and famous name of Reddit as bait to lure new teachers. When they stumble into their subs and ask any question about working in China or Korea, they are suddenly sent a dozen PM (personal messages) from the sock puppet user accounts of the recruiters with ghastly "recommendations" and "referrals" to their own real life job agencies, most of which are blacklisted skimming scams or those that tell job applicants to lie on their visa applications because they cannot get them the Z work visa that is required by Chinese law."
For this and similar comments, the CFTU is trashed and bashed especially those that appear on their famous blacklist for dishonest and unethical behaviors documented in the past here: http://www.chinaforeignteachersunion.org/2012/12/china-foreign-teachers-....
But after the same TEFL job recruiters used their dirty pool tactics to get China Scam Patrol and over a dozen other whistle blowers banned with brigadiers of false reports, and the hijacked another sub that was busy exposing them, teachers decided to fight back with this Censor-Free sub. These three links below and above show and prove the current corruption at Reddit, and hopefully, the new sub can provide some balance for TEFL teachers wanting to warn others not to sail or dock their career ships as they travel the oceans of the world.
https://www.scam.com/showthread.php?739390-SCAM-ALERT!-More-Moderator-Fr...
For factual information about teaching in Korea and China WITHOUT recruiter hype, bias, censorship, nor solicitations, please visit...
http://eslwatch.info/forum/Korea and
http://eslwatch.info/forum/China
Please note that China Scam Patrol does not sell nor promote any commercial products nor services and we have been reporting a wide variety of scams in China since 2010 as you can see by visiting http://chinascampatrol.wordpress.com.
