Scam Sites: An Update

[Omaha Steve]

http://ilcaonline.org/content/scam-sites-update

Monday, September 20, 2010

As the National Organized Labor Journal, described in the summer issue of the Guild Reporter, keeps bumbling along, stuffed with awkward prose and A-list advertisers, other pseudo-union publications keep popping up. The most recent: something calling itself the Union Trade Journal.

As confirmed by a legal department employee of a Florida-based financial services company, someone using the name Harvey Schwartz contacted her company in an attempt to sell advertising space in the Union Trade Journal. And because Harvey Schwartz is a well-known curator within labor circles and compiler of an extensive oral history of the International Longshore Workers Union, the name quickly attracted notice. “Someone with his credentials would certainly lend credibility to this publication,” observed the legal department employee.

Schwartz, alas, had never heard of the Union Trade Journal. And once the bogus caller understood that his deception had been blown he broke off contact, while messages left for him at an unpublished telephone number in Tulsa, Oklahoma went unreturned.

That might be the end of the story, except that the history of these kinds of scams suggests other potential advertisers also have been contacted. And, almost invariably, at least some of them will fall for the scheme, forking over real money for an imaginary product.

Meanwhile, the Union Trade Journal has a longer—albeit vague—history than this brief encounter suggests. The name itself was registered with the Florida Division of Corporations in 2000 by someone called Harvey Townsend, of Clearwater, but was not renewed after it expired in 2005.

And in 2004, Jay Travin—the driving force behind the National Organized Labor Journal—claimed to the Guild Reporter that while he ran a legitimate shop, some of his former employees weren’t as ethical and had gone off on their own to start up bogus union publications. One of the titles he mentioned: the Trade Union Journal.

FULL story at link.