A couple of years ago a newly acquired "friend" of my mom's asked her if she could set up the kids (meaning my brother and me) an interview with a recruiter for Microsoft that was coming to town. We were somewhat computer literate - I had worked at the computer store, and so did Gary but she didn't know that. It was odd to say the least. Then it got more suspicious - they were holding these so-called interviews at Humpty's restaurant for crying out loud.

The spider senses were tingling but we were just so curious as to what was really going on that we had to go. That was my first and thankfully last encounter with Quixtar. Needless to say we didn't sign up.

MSNBC has an interesting report about Quixtar's shady practice which sounds exactly like that first meeting:

Greg Fredericks: "If you're somewhat serious, all I mean by somewhat serious -- if you invest maybe, say, 10 to 15 hours a week in your business. This is your own business -- you could generate in the next 12 to 18 months, an extra quarter of a million."

Tim Sandler [Dateline producer]: "I'm sorry. How much?"

Fredericks: "A quarter million."

Sandler: "You're making more than $250,000 -- quarter of a million?"

Fredericks: "Umm hmm."

The funny thing for us was, the guy was trying to tell us that if we had a webpage selling goods we were going to be RICH RICH RICH. They were comparing their sales to that of Amazon.Com and Ebay. We knew it was a scam so just for entertainment purposes we went to their website, not only was it not spectacular it wasn't even working. Now Quixtar has bigger problems than an out of service webspace:

Both the FBI and the criminal division of the IRS are making separate inquiries into at least two top distributors not focused on in this [MSNBC] report.

It's probably not too late to get signed up with Amway, or Quixtar, but if you want you could always wait for the next reincarnation of the giant pyramid sales scheme organization. Thanks for the job lead mom! j/k ;)