Ellisville Company's Former Employees Say Owner Bounced Paychecks, Scammed Clients

After working with PC Telemarketing owner John Pohl for more than eight years, Cheryl Cannady said she never expected the text message she received Sept. 14.

Not only did she learn that the company was closing, but she said she was also informed that the owner was broke and would not be able to pay his employees.  

“Sunday night, he told everybody not to come in and that there wouldn’t be work for us all week because nobody reordered,” Cannady said. “So I’ve been texting him since Sunday night asking what’s going on, but he wasn’t telling us anything.”

Cannady said that Pohl then finally texted the employees four days later.

“He told us he was closing the doors for good,” she said. “He said he doesn’t have any money, and he cannot pay us. So basically, we’re not going to get our money.”

She said that he owes her between $600 and $800 for two weeks of work. Plus, Cannady said, the last three checks she received from Pohl bounced, and he had not paid the employees the full amount they were owed for about a month before the doors closed.

“For the past month or so, he gave us $100 on Fridays,” she said. “He said he would give us the rest on Monday or Tuesday, but then for the last two weeks, he didn’t give us anything.”

Cannady said she and her co-workers are “1099 employees” who receive an hourly rate plus commission. PC Telemarketing was her full-time job, and she is now unemployed.

Cannady noted that PC Telemarketing in Ellisville, formerly at 15620 Manchester Rd., is the latest of several businesses Pohl has operated in the last eight years.

“He has had three different companies since I’ve worked with him,” she said. “Encore Telemarketing, Expert Telemarketing and then PC Telemarketing. These were all owned by him.”

Cannady said that even if Pohl makes good on the money he owes her, she will never work for him again.

“I’ve never known anybody as heinous as that in my life,” she said. “There’s no way I would do that.”

Sheris Edwards, another one of Pohl’s contracted employees, said that she actually left another job to work for Pohl a few months ago.

“He called me and asked me to leave my job to work there, and I only got paid one time when I first started,” Edwards said. “Since the first paycheck, I have only been getting $100 a week, but that first check was $525.”

Edwards said that Pohl told her that her checks would be at least $400 to $600 each week. She, too, had paychecks bounce, Edwards said.

“Three checks bounced on me at my bank, and this was when things were going OK,” she said. “He doesn’t pay anything back, and he hasn’t said anything about paying it back.”

She said that this situation has put her family in a difficult financial situation. Edwards is the single mother of an 11-month-old son.

“He did this right around my rent time, so rent didn’t get paid,” she said. “I had to have family help me, and now I am trying to find a job to pay for next month.”

She said she doesn’t know how she will pay her utility bills this month, especially considering that she didn’t even have diapers for her son.

“He lied and said we were going to get paid, and he kept having us come out to work knowing he wasn’t going to pay us,” Edwards said. “He owes me at least $600, if not more.”

Edwards said that her mother, Rosalind Edwards, also worked for Pohl and “the exact same thing” happened to her.

Allegations of Scamming Clients

Cannady also said that Pohl was scamming his clients.

“The sheets he had us calling on were 10 years old,” she said. “He would promise the companies that hired him leads and would take a deposit to buy a list, but he wouldn’t buy it. He was lying to these companies and then giving him fake leads and stealing their money.”

John Pohl acknowledged to Patch that employee paychecks did bounce, but denied all other allegations. Several client complaints online, however, support Cannady’s claims.

At RipOffReport.com, a client named "Joe" from Orange Park, FL posted about his experience with the company.

“Do not use company unless you want to loose (sic) your money,” he wrote.

Joe wrote that he spent more than $6,000 for settlement leads and was promised 50 leads per day.

“The most they ever sent me in one day was maybe 10, all horrible and not in the states we provided,” he wrote. “I have called John Pohl several times with no response to any of these issues.”

Pohl posted a rebuttal, stating the claim was “totally false” and requesting that it be removed.

Another client named Katie posted on the same page that she had bought leads from Pohl’s company at $23 per lead, and that the leads were “fake and non-qualified.”

“This is 100 percent a rip-off,” she wrote. “I asked for my $6,000 back numerous times as the order wouldn’t start without a 250 weekly order, and he said he didn’t have the money to send back. I can take what he gives us, or none at all is what he told us.”

Other clients posted similar statements on the page.

At the business’ Yahoo Local listing, a reviewer states that not only did Pohl not fulfill the order they paid for, but he had to issue a fraud report through his bank in order to get the company to call him back. The reviewer wrote that the company did not replace bad leads as promised, nor would they issue a refund.

“I have since had to place another $6,000 order to another company that has been great, but I am hurting majorly from this bad experience,” the reviewer wrote.

A similar complaint appears on the business’ listing on the website of the Better Business Bureau (BBB), and the company is listed as “not BBB accredited” for problems with products or services.

John Pohl Responds

John Pohl said that while the checks did in fact bounce, he has made arrangements to cover them.

“The company anticipated some funds coming in from clients, and they didn’t,” Pohl said. “But these people cashed the checks at check-cashing places, and they got their money.”

Pohl said that he owes the balances of the bounced checks to the check-cashing companies, not his former employees.

He also said that the employees had been paid “up to the last paycheck.”

“They were probably owed some money when the company closed,” he said. “But the truth of the matter is that they (the employees) were contracted with us for a long time and always got paid.”

He said the only reason he didn’t pay the employees their final paycheck was that his clients didn’t pay him what they had agreed to pay, and that this is what caused his business to close.

“We were in business a long time, and we did good work for our clients,” Pohl said. “Like a lot of businesses, it’s been tough the last six months to a year, and we just didn’t get enough sales in. We were running by the seat of our pants for quite some time.”

He said the economy “did the company in” and reiterated that PC Telemarketing closed because its customers didn’t pay the company what they owed.  

“That’s the truth of the matter,” he said. “I’m hurting pretty bad myself. I have my mortgage and bills to pay like everyone else.”

When Patch asked about Cannady’s statements about his treatment of clients and those of the various online reviewers, Pohl flatly denied all allegations.

“That’s totally false,” he said. “Our clients have been with us for years, some of them. This is a terrible situation.”

Patch also discovered that Pohl had listed himself on LinkedIn as the president of another company, Live Plus Marketing from May 2009 to present, and as PC Telemarketing’s owner from 2004 to 2008. When asked about the information listed in his LinkedIn profile, Pohl said that there was no actual company called Live Plus Marketing and that it was simply a “marketing technique.”