Mr Smith - he is beyond comparison. The biggest TEFL vulture to walk this planet. Some of what you read below will make your flesh creep. The only pleasant thing about reading what's below is the realisation that he peddles his pedagogical 'pornography' a couple of thousand miles away from me. Even so, the words below still make me feel very uncomfortable.This guy should be checked out. He's selling franchises for 15,000 dollars, for which a teacher gets, well, I'm not sure what they get, and then they have to pay him $500 a month for admin, etc. It looks like a fairly major rip-off. I have heard many horror stories over the years, but I have never heard of teachers paying to be poor and sleeping in a classroom as an investment. This guy has taken it to lengths that your Skidrow on Sea shysters haven't even dreamt of.
I am putting together a piece about this guy, and the school he's trying to sell for over twenty thousand dollars that clears ... wait for it ... $500 a month! I wouldn't fancy trying to live off that even if I could sleep in the classroom. Yet he manages to lure people into investing in his set-up.
He charges $1,500 for a syllabus and training clocks in at $500 a day. This guy is so far beyond anything I have seen before. There may be worse somewhere, but I have never heard of it.
I suggest you pour yourself a very stiff one before opening the first link. I wouldn't recommend looking at the site while standing either. Make sure the bottle's near you for the odd top-up; you might well be there for some time, as there's a perverse pleasure in reading this one.
FURTHER COMMENTS
1) Thanks for mentioning my blog there. Anything to help get the word out about Mark Smith and his group is a boon to me and those he has exploited in the past and currently exploiting still. The comments section in the blog tell almost as much about Mark Smith as the pages do now since the man himself has been posting as aliases in comments since he couldn't get the bloghost to remove the blog itself.
2) I used to live in the Kansai area, where this Smith's scam is operated. The thing is just bad news on so many levels I don't know where to start. He advertises in all the local foreigner magazines looking for people to become "Coaches of communicative confidence" which means people willing to fork over tens of thousands of dollars and recieve nothing of value in return. Definite scam. Definite bad guy.
3) Yes, he's a shifty slut alright. I applied for a job there once, and his henchman (M) basically started putting the word out about borrowing cash, so I could buy up - through a Smiths financing scheme !! He has reached a high level of crotchrot in the EFL community over here in Japan, and is looked upon as being very very devious.
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