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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;hasaconscience, post: 1464524, member: 38617&quot;]<b>It IS as bad as you think.</b></p><p><br /></p><p>First of all, let me offer my apologies to the good people of the Coin Talk community.&nbsp; It does appear as if this thread was hijacked by two &quot;outsiders&quot; - and I am an &quot;outsider,&quot; too, so I will try to make my message brief and to the point, so as not to further impose here.&nbsp; The thread seemed to turn into something of an argument between two posters, one of them a current employee of THR, spouting the justification dogma that they are fed on a daily basis, and defending the crooked business practices of his organization.&nbsp; I felt that another perspective, the perspective of a former employee who&#039;s seen all the corruption and lies first hand. </p><p><br /></p><p>I am a former employee.&nbsp; I was not laid off in the recent round of layoffs, I walked out of that job two years ago when it became very evident how Jeff Parsons was going to run his business.&nbsp; I worked at Jeff&#039;s HOUSE for 18 months in the early days of &quot;Treasure Hunter&#039;s Roadshow.&quot;&nbsp; Some of the quotes from other sources on the internet that have been reposted here were written by me.&nbsp; (Most of them, actually.) </p><p><br /></p><p>I was pretty close to the upper echelons of management of this company, and what eventually became the triumvirate of Jeff Parsons and the DeLong brothers.&nbsp; I had a friend in accounting that passed along some information that I&#039;m certain Mr. Parsons didn&#039;t want to become common knowledge among the ranks.&nbsp; In short, I knew a LOT about what was going on in that company. </p><p><br /></p><p>I&#039;ll just say that 99.9% of what you suspect about that company is true, and it&#039;s worse than you all ever suspected. </p><p><br /></p><p>In short:&nbsp; yes, this company breaks the law every day that they have a roadshow running live.&nbsp; Yes, they are aware that they are paying incredibly low prices.&nbsp; Their training manual encourages their buyers to buy as LOW as possible.&nbsp; Ridiculously low.&nbsp; So low that it should be criminal.&nbsp; Recently, when their bank account &quot;mysteriously&quot; emptied overnight and they bounced about 4,000 checks (and not for the first time), Jeff Parsons sent an email to the company encouraging buyers to offer even lower prices than the absolutely unfair prices that they were previously offering, to beef up the &quot;company coffers.&quot;&nbsp; They never store their gold for the amount of time required by the local authorities.&nbsp; Gold gets overnighted or picked up ASAP.&nbsp; Their budget is too tight for them to do anything else.&nbsp; They HAVE to get that gold because EVERY WEEK they are on advance.&nbsp; They would spend ALL OF THEIR MONEY&nbsp; - down to the last cent, buying stuff at shows - he was so greedy, he just didn&#039;t know when to stop. They would ROUTINELY pay into the 10&#039;s of thousands of dollars in NSF fees every month.&nbsp; My personal payroll check bounced on more than one occasion.&nbsp; I was management, so Jeff would cover it with cash.&nbsp; He sold HUGE quantities of silver coinage under the table.&nbsp; Certainly enough to pay his IRS debt 2 or 3 times.&nbsp; They would have the eBay department sell coins that they KNEW were fake - they did not have a lot of quality control when it came to checking for counterfeits.&nbsp; He claimed the million dollar renovations to his home as a &quot;business&quot; expense.</p><p><br /></p><p>He DELIGHTED in the fact that folks confused his crooked operation with Antiques Roadshow.&nbsp; That is absolutely intentional.&nbsp; They, without any shadow of a doubt, willfully took advantage of people - financially fragile people, elderly people, people desperate to pay their mortgages - <i>people who could least afford to fall victim to his schemes, but who did not know any better.&nbsp; </i>Noble profession, eh? Essentially he buys his employees.&nbsp; He throws enough money at them that they throw their morals and conscience aside and become predators.&nbsp; It reminds me a bit of the Milgram experiment - Parsons gives them permission to rip people off, and all of the dogma to justify it, and pretty soon, the employees become more and more enthusiastic, to the point where they will high five each other after making a particularly &quot;good buy.&quot; (i.e. buying a valuable item for a pittance.). Jeff&#039;s not a real smart guy, but he&#039;s charismatic, and if you&#039;re already walking the tightrope of moral turpitude, he knows just what to say to tip you to the dark side. </p><p><br /></p><p>I could write several more paragraphs about the ways that this company is crooked, but I won&#039;t.&nbsp; If you suspect it, it&#039;s probably true.&nbsp; I finally got out of there when I found out they weren&#039;t paying their withholding taxes as they are supposed to.&nbsp; At current, it appears that they owe the iRS $1.3 million for the last three quarters of 2011.&nbsp; My guess is that payroll taxes were not paid for the first two quarters of 2012, either, thus I suspect his IRS debt is in reality quite a bit higher.&nbsp;&nbsp; When I found out he wasn&#039;t paying withholding taxes, I started making an exit plan.&nbsp; That, combined with fielding phone calls from angry eBay customers (because of the fakes he sold) and the phone calls from families whose elderly parents had sold family heirlooms for fractions of pennies on the dollar (items which had been melted long ago, even though they were supposed to be in &quot;storage&quot;) just got to be too much.&nbsp; The day I walked away from that operation was one of the best days I can recall.&nbsp; It&#039;s a little like being in an unhealthy or abusive relationship - you don&#039;t really realize how <i>crazy </i>it had gotten, how bad it had really gotten, until you&#039;ve been distanced from it for a few weeks.&nbsp; Man, I looked back and could not believe that I was willing to be a part of that organization for as long as I was.&nbsp; It was really, really bad and really, really crooked. </p><p><br /></p><p>So, again, I apologize for hijacking your thread - but I felt like my perspective might be appreciated, at least by some posters in this thread. </p><p><br /></p><p>Carry on and happy collecting - I will say that is the one thing that I do give credit to THR for - I went into that job not knowing much about collectible coins at all, but left it with a great education in and a big appreciation for numismatics.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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