Man, I couldn’t have written it better myself. I’ve been watching a family of “job” sites that’s akin to a pack of electronic junkyard dogs trying to bite people. I’m not even gonna give you the link. The flagship site is called Hound.com. Don’t waste your time visiting it. Trust me: You don’t want those doggie cookies on your computer.

Steve Gosset over at RealityBitesBack soundly thrashes PC Magazine for promoting A. Harrison Barnes and his pack of rabid job sites including (again, no links because I don’t want you getting infected) a bunch of sites ending in “…Crossing.”

Kudos to Steve for spraying A. Harrison Barnes (Gimme a break! Does he belong to the Yacht Club?) and his dog team with poo-poo water. (You’ll have to read Steve’s post to see where Chas Manson and droolers fit in…)

I guess Marc Cenedella over at TheLadders has an apt competitor now. Throw ’em both over the clothesline before they spawn more puppies.

Update Dec. 17, 2009: Toby Dayton draws the clothesline tight…

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21 Comments
  1. Machiavelli had it right: “In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.”

    Thanks for keeping both eyes open, Nick, and letting us know what you see.

  2. Nick, I’ve been waiting for you, lol. I like to keep my blog pure, but that doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy the poetry on yours!

    I have wondered for a long time if it’s possible to cross a line on the Internet that the FTC would care about. If it ever happened, it would be in this recession. Obama could score some real points…

    — Eric

  3. Eric,

    Poo-poo water is a highly prized emulsion but does not qualify as food or drug and is not regulated by the FDA, nor does the FTC worry about its interstate use. I found your post because I could detect the scent across the ether… you used the stuff pretty judiciously. A little dab’ll do ya. You might have been a little more generous to Charlie Manson, though — using his name in the same post with Barnes, I think you owe Charlie an apology.

  4. Thank goodness! Some light on this jerk. I work for a law firm, and on occasion we have posted job openings for a single open lawyer position on our website. Usually it is taken off within a month (because it’s filled or we have re-evaluated the need) Then out of no where we’d start receiving emails inquiring about the position. Almost always from lawyers fresh out of law school.

    Turns out one of the “crossing” sites that this Barnes jerk had taken our posting verbatim and posted it as a current opening. Granted, the people paying the fee to a website probably get what they deserve, but we actually had to have one of our lawyers call up the “crossing” site and demand that they remove any postings for our firm. Of course, then it would happen all over again.

    The moral is probably this – when a site that you have to pay for job postings says they have “all of the ‘hidden’ jobs” they may just be right – they’re hidden because they don’t exist.

    If this happens again I’m definitely suggesting we go after the site. In the end, it can make us look bad – the job seeker doesn’t want to believe that the company they are paying for job leads is wrong. It becomes a PR problem for the firms/companies that get the incorrect info out there.

  5. I found this on legalauthorityscam.blogspot.com. It seems to be a condensed version of what was posted on americanmaestro.blogspot.com and http://www.ripoffreport.com/reports/0/340/RipOff0340496.htm

    “The following was compiled from other sites listed above, this site, the BBB, and CA state offices. Bottom line is that A. Harrison Barnes is operating his sites illegally, has avoided paying taxes at least to the state of CA and might be guilty of consumer fraud. All of you might have a better recourse for recovery than just reporting them to agencies in a manner that assures that the complaints will end up in a heap of other complaints. As Katar references here, CA Civil Code Sections 1812.500-1812-523 require A. Harrison Barnes to make certain filings with the CA Secretary of State for employment related companies and he has not done so for most of his companies and only filed for the first time last November but only for the companies lawcrossing, employmentcrossing and hound. That means that anyone who ever forked over money, even if they received a service, is entitled to rescind the contract and seek back all payments with the potential for triple damages in certain cases. Every incidence of A. Harrison Barnes’ failure to comply with this law constitutes a misdemeanor and the law states that, in addition to the Attorney General, any district attorney or city attorney is authorized to investigate and prosecute these crimes.

    So all of you may want to start contacting CA district and city attorneys to file criminal complaints and one of you may want to start the ball rolling as lead plaintiff in a class action suit against all of his companies, A. Harrison Barnes and other people who control the company. If you are really angry, you can also report him to the state bar association.”

  6. Something is up with Harrison Barnes and his companies. There’s been a hell of a lot of discussion about him in the best couple of months. It looks like he is suing people for blogging about him ad his companies and people are suing back for a lot of things. It also looks like he is running from something and trying to cover up his trails. I was bunrned by two of his companies before I knew that they were both owned by him. Total waste of money. Those companies were Vanara and Legal Authority. I want my money back and want to be sure that he does not have my personal information. How can I do that?

  7. It looks like BCG Attorney Search may not be around for long. Since January 2009 recruiters have left the company in Boston, San Francisco, Palo Alto, Texas, Los Angeles and Washington DC. Last year the manager of BCG quit the company because he was tired of putting up with Harrison Barnes’s shady methods and other recruiters left in Atlanta/Charlotte and New York. Right now there is one recruiter that has not done any work this year for “personal reasons” and at least two other recruiters are planning to leave.

    BCG now has a couple of people in NY, 1 in DC, 1 in TX 2 in Chicago and a couple in southern CA but only a few of those are active. Morale is terrible and Harrison never discusses departures honestly with the rest of the recruiters so it is not clear if these people were fired or quit. One thing for certain is that departures are usually bitter and Harrison Barnes speaks very poorly and disparagingly of his employees after they leave. What he says is much worse than anything written by the people he is suing and none of it is true. Harrison Barnes takes pride in running his businesses in secret while deceiving everyone including his employees. For example, during 2009 he constantly told the recruiters that BCG was strong and growing while the company was falling apart. The reason he speaks so poorly of other employees is so he can blame them for the problems that are entirely of his own making.

    Part of the 2009 breaking point came in April when Harrison harassed the recruiters to attend a recruiting convention in DC and told the recruiters how important it was that everyone attend. Some people thought they would be fired if they didn’t attend. Then, instead of attending the convention himself, Harrison races off to a multi-thousand dollar motivational seminar (probably paid for by the company) and then continues to vacation in the Pacific. Harrison also annoys recruiters to fill their free in this bad economy time by writing articles and blogs even though he doesn’t pay any recruiters anything except for commissions and is less than honest with how he pays his recruiters.

    I used to like Harrison Barnes but he couldn’t hide his true self this year. He became the Emperor with no Cloths and nobody would tell him the truth because he usually fired anyone who disagreed with him. I think the reason so much of the background is coming out now is because so people have left and are still leaving and have nothing to lose by revealing the truth. Every former and remaining recruiter at BCG are great, hard-working and caring people. It is a shame that it took so long for everyone to learn his true nature. My guess is that just about every remaining recruiter will leave at the first opportunity, especially as the economy gets better.

  8. This all happened in 2008 but I guess my experience was not unique and people should hear about it. I signed up for BCG three times but was rejected as unqualified each time. The first time was because I only had one year of work experience. The other times I was told that my law school was not prestigious enough. My school is in the top 5o in the US News rankings but I know of two people who BCG accepted from schools in the bottom half of the rankings including Northern Kentucky School of Law and Tauro School of Law (no insult intended but that’s just where the schools ranked). Then I couldn’t get out of constant unsolicited e-mails from filling my inbox every day. The latest bulk of e-mails come from JDJOURNAL, another Harrison Barnes company.

    Anyway, I tried Lawcrossing. I never was able to find out if the jobs that I applied to were real but I did get a letter back from the attorney general’s office of a state next to where I live stating that no such jobs existed in their offices and further asked me why I thought that there was a job opening. I told them through Lawcrossing and the person in the office told me that they had a lot of problems with that company because they advertised many jobs that didn’t exist including jobs for deputy attorney generals.

    Then I tried to cancel my subscription and that was a total nightmare. No online or e-mail options so I had to call at my own expense because there was no toll free number. I was on hold forever only to reach a person with a typical U.S. name but obviously not from the U.S. He tried everything to keep me as a customer or sell me other products. I couldn’t just hang up because I wouldn’t be sure that they processed my request. After I finished with their customer service I immediately called my own state attorney general in MD, the attorney general in the neighboring state (PN) and the better business bureau to complain.

  9. I have been on the case of Mr.Barnes since he scammed me with a bad check approximately two years ago. Mr. Barnes has tried everything to quiet the growing chorus of people who are screaming at government agencies to take a serious look at the scams he is perpetrating. Barnes, so far, has been successful with his rackets. Bernie Madoff got away with his scam for thirty years, all the while people who knew better reported him to federal agencies. Like Madoff, Barnes threatens to sue his critics and has filed suit against myself and several other bloggers for our internet reporting of his scams. I will never take down my blog and will never stop reporting the truth about this scoundrel.

  10. Go get ’em A.M. Hey, what happened to your blog anyway. It disappeared from the Google first page rankings? And what’s the story about the bad check? I thought you were just a sideline critic?

  11. Mr. Barnes,

    It astounds me that you continue to write your blog with such blatantly dull and bizarre stories. I have tried to comment a few times but you seem to block anything critical of you or your musings. That’s OK. It’s your blog.

    But yesterday, 8/25/09 was a “Barnes-burner.” Your laments about some beautiful and well-accomplished girl in your early school was incredulous. You said that she was a black belt and then said that she viciously attacked a fellow classmate merely because she called her a whore.

    As a student of martial arts I know that your story is bull. A highly ranked martial artist is trained to understand that they are bestowed with a potentially lethal weapon and force should be used only when necessary. A true black-belt would not have have knocked out someone’s teeth because of a mere insult and lacking a need for physical self-defense. Your BS is piling so high that people need neoprene wayfarers to stay above the manure. Then you conclude that you knew that the allegations weren’t true because you knew of her every activity outside of class (even if you limited it to a lone reference to her martial arts class attendance).

    Your diatribe did give insight into why you are lashing out at your critics. Somewhere in your childhood you seemed to have learned that tirades earned you better results as opposed to stoicism and renewed focus on tolerance and self-improvement. It seems that you view the law and lawsuits as your personal version of a misused black-belt. Just plain pathetic.

    One last point. Please stop your constant referrals to women as either physically pretty or hot or ugly or fat as though that has any relevance to your theme. It is gross and insulting although your beauty and appearance fixations speak volumes of your character.

    Do us all a favor and aspire to something better.

    Thank you for your time.

    BBR

  12. More Proof That A. Harrison Barnes Resorts to Deceptive and Fraudulent Consumer Tactics!!

    The FTC today finally ruled that blogsters who are paid to post reviews on products or services must now disclose the fact they were paid or face penalties up to $11,000 per infraction. This action by the FTC formalizes its long-standing belief that a lack of such disclosure violates consumer protection laws because such blog comments amount to undisclosed paid endorsements amounting to fraudulent and deceptive advertising.

    The first indication that A. Harrison Barnes either paid people to post positive comments about his companies or asked people to post positive comments even if they were unfamiliar with the service first surfaced in 2008 in a blog posting by Cathy Gellis who confirmed that Mr. Barnes manipulated Amazon’s mTurk service to enlist individuals to “plant” false positive comments about Barnes’s companies. Ms. Gellis worked with Amazon to effectively bar Barnes from further use of mTurk. Since that time, scores of other similar incidents appeared on other websites.

    In response to having been caught in his deceptive practices, A. Harrison Barnes then launched a virtual carbon copy of mTurk called Shorttask and used this site to pay thousands of people to plant comments and links that would make his companies appear to be much more effective, positive and favorable than the general view of other more reputable sites. Shorttask has been widely criticized as a deceptive and manipulative tactic to counter the rising tide of complaints against both he and his companies. (It should be noted that during the same period Barnes decided to sue individuals who posted negative comments about both he and his companies claiming $10 million in damages).

    The latest move by the FTC merely formalizes what people have long known – that A. Harrison Barnes is willing to engage in questionabe, and probably illegal, consumer tactics to mislead the public as to the nature and poor quality of his companies and their services.

    NYT Article: http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/10/05/technology/AP-US-TEC-Bloggers-FTC.html

    FTC Statement: http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2009/10/endortest.shtm

  13. Global people will not follow a lot of structure and may describe their day in no specific order when speaking about it. When being given assignments or things to do, global people will mostly be more interested in hearing just a general overview of the work they need to do.In every job I have ever had, I have been happy for the most part. When I was an attorney, for example, I liked many aspects of being an attorney.In this article Harrison discusses how each person has a particular type of nature.

  14. Mr. Jazz looks like yet another blogger paid by Harrison Barnes to post something positive. The only problem, Mr. Jazz posted on the wrong website. I guess thats what you get when you pay someone five cents to do your dirty work.

  15. Harrison Barnes is quite the shyster. We operate next generation employment portal. Harrison has been trying to steal our traffic since day one. We were alerted to some more amazing garbage this morning.

    Full story is here
    http://blog.jobshouts.com/2010/01/07/hound-com-is-a-scam/

  16. the thread at the bottom of the link posted by eileen gives some good insight into what lurks behind the a. harrison Barnes emloyment companies.

    http://www.ripoffreport.com/employment-services/bcg-attorney-search/bcg-attorney-search-and-affili-a7g3b.htm

  17. A very important blog post about how A. H. Barnes operates his scemes may be found here (at the bottom).

    http://www.ripoffreport.com/attorneys-legal-services/legal-authority/legal-authority-a-harrison-ba-573p4.htm

    Looks like the rumors about outsourcing all operations to India are true. What a joke. Like I would ever trust a U.S. emloyment company based in India. I mean, in this economy I’m not even sure if I would trust one based in Canada.

  18. Barnes is the never ending idiot. He writes about so much garabage but his recent rhetoric has gone loony tunes. The following was written in response to his attempt to once again paint himself as the all-knowing expert on careers and the once brilliant lawyer. Here was a response I attempted to post but his little friends in India, the only real employees that he has (and he doesn’t even manage them but uses people in India), deleted the response. Here it goes:

    On March 27, 2010 Jeter wrote:
    What are you talking about Harrison. Your attempts to rewrite your history are sick. That furniture store? Well maybe they were cold to you because your behavior once forced them to file a restraining order against yesterday. And give up on saying that you were a student lon company. You were a two bit middleman who used his database of students to generate leads for real finance companies. Your employees left? Well, usually you fire them but most others don’t stay becauase they can’t stand working for a person and a place that is insane. Those commission people that stuck around after you forced most of them to resign? They are a group of people who either have significant others supporting them so they don’t have to quit, they are able to run side businesses to support their income or at least one can’t gert a job because he was disbarred from CA.

    No wonder why your own resume includes the inability to hold a job for any length of time. Only this week you told us bout quitting the job with the job, ten going to Quinn. And in the past you wrote about having to “leave” Quinn (which was so great that they made a partner out of a person who acheived his status as a drubk person who sleeps in dumpsters), then went to Dewey (or some other firm), was probably fired from them and couldn’t get your job back anyplace else. Now you sit back and pretend to be some great owner of companies with keen insight as to how to manage careers.

    How does Harrison Barnes respond to adversity? He lies about events and makes up stories about his achievements. What a disgrace.

  19. For those who questioned the fragility of A. Harrison Barnses’ operations (combined with his wife, Claudia Barnes, who is now fighting to preserve her last nickle after acknowledging that her husband is a fraud), look at the abrupt change in his beloved BCG Attorney Search personnel.

    At its core, A. Harrison Barnes (and his wife Claudia Barnes) always tried to blame his business failures upon those who failed him in his employment and hiring decisions.

    The past few weeks prove the truth. The person responsible for most of A. Harrison Barnes’ profits, Daniel Binstock (who was also the best man when A. Harrison Barnes married the unsuspecting Claudia), left the company. He also left A. Harrison Barnes without a key cash flow.

    His next defectors included the entire NY office of Carey and Danice. They decided that life under A. Harrison Barnes was too bizarre and corrupt to continue.

    Bravo to Binstock, Danice and Carey. May you all prosper despite the automatic negativeness that might emerge only because you worked for BCG and A. Harrison Barnes.

  20. I followed Mr. Barnes’ companies and programs for awhile. I now have no question that he ripped me off and is a fake.

    What tipped me off was his constant obsession about the importance of being a worker who was in synch with the employer and was a person with a history of stayaing with employers over long periods.

    Harrison Barnes talks alot about his days as an asphault contractor in Detroit. He seems to really love that part of his life. Great.

    But in all of his writings Mr. Barnes admits that he could not hold down a job beyond his passion for asphault contracting. No college jobs. Lived away from people in law school. Fired from his position as a legal clerk in Michigan. Tossed aaround between law firms in LA.

    Now A. Harrison Barnes offers his insight as to what constitutes a successful employee at the same time that he can’t keep his own businesses intact and those who weren’t fired decided to abandon his insane business concepts.

    A. Harrison Barnes is a fraud with no practical experience. He has been terminated every time he was an employee. Please do not be hoodwinked by the fact that A. Harrison Barnes is now trying to rip off people by offering a “career course.”

  21. Seems like success truly does bring a lot of heat. I have in the years known many people that have worked with Barnes’ companies and have had a whirlwind of success. I have spoken to him personally and could not be a nicer guy. It is sad that some people that dont qualify for something automatically assume it is fake or a lie. Maybe they do just work with certain people and not others and chose that niche. And since people are posting articles here is a great one to read:
    http://www.jdjournal.com/2016/02/09/slime-for-cash-above-the-law-joins-alberts-a-k-a-robert-kinney-decade-long-ballistic-cyberbullying-campaign-to-destroy-competitor-for-firing-him/