WARNING: DO NOT TRUST ANYONE INVOLVED IN HIRING! I was contacted by a recruiter (Granite Solutions Groupe) by phone in March 2017. That interview went well and they set me up with an onsite interview the following week. That interview went well. Then the recruiter informed me that they were making an offer. He gave me access to the onboarding portal where I signed all 24 required forms. The EVP of the recruiting agency also signed all the forms. They then called my references and did my background check, and everything checked out. In two different documents, the contract stated in writing my start date of 4/17/17. In other words, it was about the firmest and most formal offer you'll ever see. Turns out it was fake -- and the way they went about telling me that was even worse. Once I signed the contract and had a confirmed start date, I suspended my job search and told other companies that I was taking another offer. I also had to go out and buy a car (I had recently moved from NYC and so didn't have one) and rent an apartment. Since I thought I would need to commute a long distance, I specifically bought a more expensive plug-in hybrid so that I would be eligible to drive in the carpool lane in California without any passengers. I looked around at apartments, but (fortunately) eventually decided to stay at Airbnb's at first until I knew more about whether the end date would be extended. The recruiter told me that I would need to make a fingerprinting appointment before starting work, but that I would have to do so according to instructions sent directly from Bank of the West. I still hadn't received this email by Thursday of the week before my start date (which was a Monday), so I contacted the recruiter about it. They were actually recruiting for six identical Statistical Modeler positions, and they said they were constantly emailing and calling Bank of the West about the fingerprinting requirement and getting no response. They had no idea what was going on. The Friday before the start date, they told me that Bank of the West told them that their HR computer systems were having a problem, and that was why they were unable to send out the onboarding emails in a timely manner (spoiler: Bank of the West lied). When they lied to the recruiter, they never told him when this fake IT issue might be resolved. However, they did tell him that they had moved my job to a different department within the bank, and that the head of that department wanted to talk to me. I expressed my concern about whether this was meant to be an interview, but the recruiter assured me that it was only a formality so he could get to know me ahead of time. The offer, he said, was already signed and dated. I had the "casual conversation" on the Monday that would have been my start date, and it was basically an interrogation. He didn't even say hello or any greeting to start the conversation, and just immediately dug into details about work I had done years ago and couldn't even remember. He bizarrely didn't seem to care about my recent work experience. Even if I had remembered all the details of my old work, I didn't have time to discuss it since he had to cut off the call at 30 minutes in. I started freaking out and had trouble sleeping. The recruiter called me the following morning to inform me that he was unable to contact anyone at Bank of the West and that he would definitely call me back later that day. He finally called me back before he left for work, and informed me that it's "all quiet on the Western Front." The following day, the recruiter called me to inform me that Bank of the West was rescinding the offer. In the same manner, they also rescinded the offer to one of the other six people they had extended offers to. According to the signed and dated contract (which even to this day has not been modified), this was supposed to have been my third day of work. He said that Bank of the West didn't tell him why they rescinded those two offers, and that they would be providing no compensation. I asked him if he could get them to call me to at least explain what happened and maybe provide some compensation, and he told me that he would try to guilt them into doing something. The next day, he informed me that they didn't care one iota about what happened, and that they would not be contacting me to ever even explain what happened. I talked to three attorneys to see if I could do anything about this legally. They all told me that since the "contract" said it was at-will, the "contract" wasn't really a contract. Of course, in practice many employers have this little thing called a conscience that prevents them from viciously lying to their employees or violating employment agreements -- but not Bank of the West! It would be possible to collect damages if I could prove a quantifiable dollar injury amount, but they said that would be difficult in my case. The system is rigged, as usual.