Published Friday, March 14, 2003
reportedly
begins
probe
By Michael Roknick
Herald Business Editor
An investigation into a company involved in what has been described as a massive bait-and-switch job scam was reportedly started Thursday by the Ohio Attorney General's Office.
That comes on the heels of the Pennsylvania Attorney General's Office shutting down the company's operations Tuesday and seizing records at its Erie office on Wednesday.
"It is my understanding they opened their own inquiry as of today,'' Darrel Vandeveld, deputy attorney general in charge of the regional office in Erie, said Thursday.
Michele Gatchell, media relations spokeswoman for the Ohio Attorney General, said she couldn't confirm or deny that an investigation into a company calling itself American Air Line or American Air Lines had begun.
However, Mrs. Gatchell said the office has received a couple of inquiries or complaints on its toll-free consumer hot line about American Air Line. She also said help-wanted ads, similar to those run in Pennsylvania newspapers, including The Herald, appeared in the Ashtabula, Ohio, newspaper.
Ads in Pennsylvania touted starting positions paying $450 a week with American Air Line or American Air Lines, which was relocating its national manufacturing plant to the area and was hiring 45 full-time positions. The companies have no relationship to national air carrier American Airlines, the Attorney General's Office said.
More than 1,000 job-seekers mobbed motels in East Lackawannock Township, Meadville and Erie earlier this week to apply for those manufacturing jobs, only to discover they were door-to-door vacuum cleaner and air-filtration sales positions.
Karla Smith, an American Air representative who said she lives in Cambridge Springs, told The Herald Tuesday the ads were a misprint and that the company went under the name American Air Filtration. She also said only one manufacturing job would be offered locally but other positions would be available.
Vandeveld, who early in the week called Ms. Smith's misprint assertions ludicrous, went further on Thursday.
"Smith's claims that the advertisements were misprints are false,'' he said. "We have copies of the advertising she submitted to various publications. They're identical except for where the location of the manufacturing plants were supposedly relocating to.''
A $100.98 check signed by Karla J. Smith for February help-wanted ads which appeared in The Herald and its sister publication, Allied News, bounced. The check had the company name American Air printed on it, with a Saegertown post office box address. Saegertown is about 4 miles south of Cambridge Springs.
Those ads said American Air Line was moving its national headquarters to the area but didn't identify it as a manufacturing plant.
John Tobias, a Cambridge Springs resident and owner of American Air Filtration, has been cooperating with investigators, Vandeveld said. He added his office is conducting a consumer-fraud investigation into the company but no arrest warrants have been issued for Tobias or anyone connected with the company.
As previously reported, a person familiar with the investigation said Tobias is on probation in Erie County for theft-related offenses. No phone numbers are listed for Tobias' home or American Air and a number given as Tobias' cell phone goes unanswered.
Among the items seized by investigators in American Air's Erie office were job applications, Vandeveld said.
"Our office has literally gotten hundreds and hundreds of phone calls from people who are understandably upset that personal information about them is on the applications and that information is out there,'' Vandeveld said. "One of our main goals is to recover as much of that as we can.''
He appealed to anyone who filled out an application with the company to contact the AG's office.
"We want people to contact us to file a complaint,'' he said. "Ideally, we would be able to return all these documents to the people who submitted them.''
Vandeveld said he's assigned two investigators to the probe.
"We're going full force on this,'' he said.
The state Attorney General's Office asks anyone who filled out a job application with the company calling itself American Air Filtration to file a complaint. The office can be reached at (800) 441-2555 or (814) 871-4371. Complaints also can be filed online at: www.attorneygeneral.gov