i know danny liu very well.he is also cheating teachers with another devil call sicily or mrs. zhang.they are number is this field of cheating foreigners,i workrd for them in jinan city ,i wasn't paid for two months.they also took away from my salary a 1000 yuan as tax every month.i m tired of pursuing them,but i hope god will give me another chance to meet them face to face.

That post was directed at espero, not towards you, xinglish.

By "you guys" I mean people with substandard English trying to make a living teaching it.

I've met all kinds of you lot, Germans, Fillipinos, Russians, French, etc, trying to pass yourselves off as native speakers while teaching butchered, pidgin English to hapless Chinese people.

Hero's point was that the Chinese students are also victims because they end up with teachers who can't even speak or write English properly.

Imagine I wrote a post complaining about buying a load of pirated DVDs of poor quality. "I'm the victim!" Someone would be bound to point out that the movie industry is also the victim and that I shouldn't complain so much.

If you:

Can't speak English well
Lie to your students about where you are from
Work illegally on an F visa

You may end up getting cheated yourself. That sucks but don't expect too much sympathy from others. Play with matches, get burned.

I highly doubt that anyone is misrepresenting themselves. The teachers who get conned out of money that they earned, by dishonest "agents", are the victim. You would be too if you worked for money and then wasn't paid.

Are you saying that a Chinese person can't tell the difference between a native English speaker and some Euro weenie (or Asian) that's trying to pass him or herself off as one? Give me a break.

And, Zero, your DVD analogy is terrible. If you buy pirated DVDs (or any good for that matter) and you know it's pirated then, clearly, no. You shouldn't go crying to mom when you find out the quality isn't up to par.

But if you're a person who is given a job to do and you do it and don't get paid then, yeah, I think someone has the right to cry foul about that. The school is obviously complicit (any school administrator anywhere that can't tell the difference between a native English speaker and someone who's not is daft) because they allow the teacher to keep teaching students that paid money for the lessons. The agents are crooked because they're keeping the teacher's money. And the teacher gets screwed when all he was doing was being trusting of someone who "helped" him or her get a job.

They might not have legal recourses to pursue but they can still cry foul on here, and other websites perhaps, and raise awareness.

The guy above who posted about getting conned in Jinan has every right to be pissed about getting jacked for his hard earned coin.

A point I forgot to touch on: if an individual lies about where they're from to get into an English teaching classroom then that's pathetic (although I have seen it happen) and wrong. But English teaching agents know where people come from because they look at documents (passport) beforehand. If some dude from Ghana is represented as a Canadian, for example, then other people are covering for him - it aint just him that's lying. So he does the work and gets conned - and you think it's fair?

It's not.

But then, neither, is most of the sh*t that happens.

I know exactly what your talking about. I'm from America they just do that to make extra money but all they do is play games because they don't know how to teach English and are 'Not' Native speakers. One guy at a school if you would like to know is from Africa and says he's 'American'. Every teacher filipino, jamaican, kenyan none native speakers all said the same thing 'He's from Africa just trying to make more money and pass by as an American' What a shame and the chinese employers actually believe a dishonest 'Man' if that's what you want to call a person like him. Alot of times the students act like Zombies and feel as if they would like to escape the treacherous teaching styles of these so called Native speakers from the Phillipines or Africa.

I think Filipinos are the worst offenders here. They speak a sort of English-hybrid over there, then come over here with their mangled pronunciation.

"Goodah mahning cheeeldren. I'm Meeester Madijanon."