What should have been a simple task: finding some contact information and writing an email or making a phone call, turned into a sleepless night of wading through scams and scandals..
*NOTE: If you have not done so already, please read part one of this post for context.
Ok, so the first thing that threw a monkey wrench into my plans was.. I couldn't find the company!
In my recollection, the TEFL course that I took was with a company called World TEFL school, or something like that.. It supposedly had many locations placed around the world, but the one it promoted on its website, and the one I signed up for, was based in Koh Samui, Thailand.
I thought surely this was enough info for a quick google search. Boy, was I wrong..
I did find a course named TEFL World and it was located in.. Koh Samui, Thailand! hmm..
Another thing I remembered about my experience was that it was run by a short, stocky Scottish bloke that we nicknamed Imp. He basically left a bad taste in everyone's mouth. But luckily, he wasn't the instructor so we didn't see much of him...
This TEFL World though seemed to owned and operated by a stocky british-looking guy named Darren.. I was convinced it was the Imp. I tried calling the number on their site.. no answer.. they didn't provide an email address to contact.. finally I noticed that little [f] Facebook symbol on the bottom of the page and sent a message there.
I received a response. "You must have the wrong TEFL company.." I was sure it was them! I doubled down and dug deeper...
I tunneled to the BOTTOM of my inbox.. messages from nearly a dozen years ago.. I FOUND what I was looking for.. A correspondence with WorldTEFLschool.. phone numbers, website, and a first name...
..Jimmy..
Ok, so I was WRONG about TEFL World, which turned out to be a big red herring in our investigation, but at least NOW I had a lot more concrete evidence to go on!
First, I tried the website.. 404 Error: This site doesn't exist.
Uh oh.. not a good sign... I thought a phone call might work, but the numbers were out of operation. Damn.. I'd have to resort to different tactics if I was going to continue my investigation..
I googled: "What happened to WorldTEFLschool?"
There were some hits of a few people inquiring about the school.. but the posts were from 12 years ago..
Then I found one post that was about blacklisted TEFL organizations!...it seemed like somewhere in the comments someone had mentioned WorldTEFLschool.. so I dove in.