Hi Dragon,

Brief story. A few years ago I went to the embassy and had my passport seized. No reason given. Really a shite attitude too. OK, fine. I waited it out since I have a 2nd passport from another nation anyway. 2,3,and 4 weeks go by...I get pissed and called up a US Senator and a US Congressman. Come to find out some A-wipe from China used my credentials, passport, degree, etc., to impersonate me and had been applying for credit cards, etc., etc., That was lovely. Fortunately I did not have my passport, and had not left China at that time, because if I did, I would have been sitting in jail somewhere trying to explain A-Z about things that I had no idea about in the first place. They eventually caught the SOB and arrested him and his whole F-ing crew for criminal impersonation, conspiracy, etc., etc. I also had a school in China try and impersonate me as well by using a copy of my passport and a faked signature to try and get access to my college records. That case is active and ongoing now and it involves several acronyms. What they were doing was trying to obtain access to sensitive and privileged information using the mail and the wire to accomplish fraud. I also sued them and won and now I am suing them again in another jurisdiction as well. I have since left the USA as a citizen, but the case is being handled by an attorney and it does not effect the action so far.

What happens, if you ever bother to look, is that these Chinese criminals sell your degree in whole or in part to degree mills, most of which are in the UK somewhere. They focus on seals, watermarks, textured paper, font, color schemes, and logos. The degree mills pay top bucks because for fake degrees they make thousands of dollars and once they have a great copy, it is cheap and easy to reproduce thousands of BA's from XYZ college as an example. Most, many, foreigners, in my own opinion, are just to damn stupid and hand anything and everything over to just anyone, without any clue about who they are sending their documents to. Very scary and extremely stupid.

2 agencies you want to have on speed dial are the US Secret Service and the US Postal Inspection Service. Both agencies just love mail fraud, wire fraud and fake documents.

Back to my school...So there I was at home on Skype one night and I get a message from the college. It was someone that knows me quite well at my campus and they had my Skype ID. They wanted me on cam and voice to talk about a problem. The next thing I know, I see a 2nd body in the cam background and it is the campus public safety officer, (police). I somewhat knew the cop since he was a reservist and we used to talk off and on and from time to time. Anyway, he alerts me that someone in China is trying to access my files and my records and wants to know if it is me first of all, and secondly if I authorized anyone to act as my agent. Answer...NO and NO. At all of my colleges I have clearly worded and specific statements on file that all of my records are blocked and to call police immediately if anyone wants my records, and certainly so if I am not there in person making the request with 2 valid forms of ID, signature, student ID card, PIN, and a password.

Dragon, yes. You can find out via a few ways whether or not someone is impersonating you.

1) Run a FREE credit report on yourself spanning all 3 credit bureaus. You might find out that you are the proud new owner of an active BlackBerry account that you knew nothing about. (As was my case.) The nice about idiots that open cell phone accounts....is that since the phone is in your own name....you can also get your own calling records and then then give those to the police who can run all of the numbers and you can also reverse directory all of them yourself on line for free too. Phone numbers come with names, addresses, dates, times, etc.

2) You can appear in person at the US Embassy and ask to speak to the FBI legal attache, and/or the US Department of Diplomatic Security special agent for the US Embassy in Beijing. They will of course listen to your concerns, take and run your passport, (they do anyway, whether you know it or not), and if anyone is using your ID, there might be some action that they can pick up on and then you can work with them on the spot. They may for example cancel your passport instantly and give you an application to do it all over again.

3) You can pay about 25 bucks online and do a social security locate on yourself. That is also interesting. In my case I lived in places I never heard of before, and owned a double wide trailer. I was also working at a company I never heard of before. Very nice... ID theft is a lot of fun. I had a few open merchant accounts that were being charged on a regular basis too. Oh by the way, the idiot that did this all was a Chinese national illegally living in Los Angeles, California.

To anyone out there saying...what's the big deal? Or, I have nothing to hide....OK, that's cool. Wait until you fly home and you get arrested and held by the US Customs or US Marshal's Service at the port of entry and you don't know why. After a few hours of cooling your stupid butt in an airport holding facility pending transportation to the county jail or better yet, federal holding facility, and when you finally are advised of your Miranda Rights and face the FBI for a few hours of questioning...you'll "get it" then. 30-days later while you are still waiting in jail in a deer hunter orange jumpsuit for a pretrial appearance, and after you lose your job, your girlfriend, and people have no idea where you are, and they finally realize it was all a mistake...maybe you'll think twice about being so stupid and blindly sending your ID and degree and resume to some fool online that claims to be a recruiter. In my own case, my data was stolen from the employer and the school HR manager lied in several documents to a college claiming that I was applying for a job at their school after I had already left! There is currently a warrant out for her arrest and one can only hope she goes to the USA and I do hope they grant her a visa. Sadly I doubt that they will. She is currently wanted by the Texas Department of Public Safety, Texas Attorney General's Office and the U.S. Attorney General's Office in Texas, U.S. Postal Inspection Service, and apparently the U.S. Government Printing Office Police. The next time I see her in court I am half tempted to slap some cuffs on her myself and haul her ass over to the front gates of the US Embassy and toss her onto US property and whistle.

If you are overseas for a long time you need to run your credit for free annually and run all 3 bureaus. It just make sense and you can also place fraud alerts in your credit reports. DO IT. Its free!

What I tell any valid employer if they want to see my documents is that I will gladly bring them in person. If the government, (not them) needs a copy, let the government make the copies and then document who is doing it and where. Date, time, place, reason, etc. I even use my cell phone when and where possible to photo them doing it. Its so worth it!

As for anyone making copies of your US passport...stupid....I urge you to read the US Patriot Act and the Homeland Security rules pertaining to machine readable travel documents and take a look at the inside of your passport where it discusses first of all that your passport is not to be used by any other person for any reason, and that the passport belongs to the US government, not you. If they get a whiff of someone doing something odd or funny with your name, dob, etc., CLICK! You are on the shite list and the next time you clear customs anywhere....you'll be sitting in a nice little side room of the airport in XYZ country waiting for a nice man from INTERPOL to have a chat with you until a US consular officer can come sit with you for some fun Q&A.

Lucky you! If its a good day, you look and feel like shite and its hot so you are sweating and you're already freaked out and nervous and so....they won't believe you...UR Guilty friends...Got 25K for a good international lawyer?

China VOIP works well enough and the speed, at least where I live is fast. More than adequate for teaching online. Finding a valid job in China that follows China law is next to impossible. You can find bad jobs anywhere in China and deal with some scum recruiters that are also frauds and they in turn sell your credentials to black market document mills for illegal reproduction, and/or sell your ID to overseas Chinese needing to maintain or create a paper trail in some other land since they now live in XYZ nation illegally. I deliberately screw with recruiters and bogus schools all of the time just to see which way the wind blows and how far someone will go and I keep tight tabs on all of the latest scams as well. I would not advise anyone to work as a teacher in China and I am in fact a licensed teacher myself but I gave up teaching in China.

The markets for teaching in China are bad, low paying, usually poor environments, and the only exception to that might be some colleges, certainly not most or all of them. China is an extremely expensive country to live in if you play by the rules and pay taxes. My current annual salary is a strong 7 figures in China and I get screwed on China taxes. Fortunately I am no longer an American, otherwise I would be paying their damn taxes on top of it all.

Networking in China is largely a total waste of time that will usually get you no where. In order to network with people that know anything in most cases, you need to join high-end VIP clubs where most valid ex-pats with so-called real jobs, go to drink and escape from all of the BS. By the time they get there, the last thing that they want to do is network anyway and in between trying to dodge all of the Chinese trying to ride in on the coat tails of successful foreigners, or the third rate losers from some below middle management job that managed to get past security with a trial VIP pass for a few days courtesy of some BS back handed pass off from the AMCham, (also a total joke BTW), networking is a failed game.

I belong to the Beijing Capital Club and I also golf. What I see there are pain in the ass so-called elite being snobby, and people kissing their asses trying to be just like them. When I joined many years ago things were much different. These days my family and I go out to the country and get away from the C.R.A.P. and we have met some nice people that way which is kind of a reverse or un-networking of sorts which is good.

By the way I used to live in Thailand where you are now and I enjoyed it. If I were you I would stay put and forget about China completely.

Internet marketing is in fact the answer, but the problem with what you are doing or trying to do, is that you are still a service provider and therefore you are tied to your machine at the hip and that is not productive. Why not make a Web site, upload lessons online via a secure PIN, and let students click and learn and then your up sell to that would be one on one lessons or one on one follow ups after each section of lessons instead of babysitting Skype all damn day.

Visas in China? Scam. Its all about who you know in 9 times out of 10. You can leave and reenter China 101 times on a multiple entry tourist visa or L visa, but why waste the time and the money? Whatever you do, never trust a Chinese with your visa and your passport in China. That is rule number one.

Trash your "boots on the ground" idea for China as well. Its been done by 100,000 other people and they are no further ahead for it. My best advice in your situation is to get on YouTube.com since it is free and let you do your ads online for free. Zero air time costs, zero production costs, and global reach. One good video with good meta tags and key words and a few subscriptions along with a Twitter account will get the job done for you for FREE.

Don't spend money on the Internet other than for a dedicated server (depending on your Web site traffic), a good URL, and maybe some design although with places like GoDaddy.com you can do it all yourself with some 28,000 photos and hundreds of templates and click and point build outs it is easy as hell. GoDaddy is a bitch on pricing though and I don't like their CS at all, but their system is good and functional.

If I were you I would stay in Thailand and look at marketing into Lao and even Cambodia or Vietnam. There is some nice money to be made there and since you are not a Filipino, you could get some better action then they do in similar venues.

Thailand totally sucks for doing business however, but as you are largely online, keep in online and no one cares. Make sure you rotate your money on incoming pays away from PayPal because if you get too busy they like to close down your accounts even if the incoming cash is totally legit. If you are an American keep the cash off of the US soil. Remember, it matters where you "take receipt of" your money. IF you are using US-based banking systems....that's just stupid.

Singapore is good, in fact very good for banking privacy these days, better than Switzerland and a few other so-called safe havens.

If you are really ambitious, why not write your own stuff, copyright it all, file a patent on it, and sell some small franchisees if it is good? Build an online ESL in the box for dummies type of thing. Click and point etc.

Look at DynEd software as an example. Its some of the worst C.R.A.P I have ever seen and they make millions.

F China.
Stay put in the land of smiles and enjoy the life.

If UR already making money on Skype and live in Thailand, why move at all? Let the power of the Internet do the work. A physical move into China is not going to help you. Why not invest some cash in a Web site with online chat support which links back to YOU, and a brief bio page with a squeeze page and some points of sale options such as Pay Pal. Click Bank, etc.?

Of course you would want to do that in Chinese and in English and Korean while you are at it. Make sure the SEO's are set and that you have done your key word research and launch it from Thailand. (SEO by the way means Search Engine Optimization). Key word research can also be surprising. For example, a Web site about teaching English would use what key words? Teaching English right? Wrong. Sometimes the busiest key words that would help a Web site don't actually use the related key words in a search so it pays to look around a little bit. The Web site address itself should of course be something like SkypeESL.com but as for the meta tags and key words, if you want to pop up high in the search engines of Baidu as an example, you need to do some homework.

Stay in Thailand, don't dis the king, live cheaper and smile more. Forget about China.