Early last month, with three young children and a wife to support back in his hometown in Colombia, Carlos, like thousands before him, turned to an employment agency – one that promised “the best employers and employees in New York City construction, restaurants, and taking care of older people.” Today, he is $100 poorer and still unemployed.

Employment agencies for manual laborers and domestic workers, flourishing in immigrant hubs such as Jackson Heights in Queens and Manhattan’s Chinatown, are an alluring solution for poorer newcomers searching for work in a vast city. For a fee, the promises of easy labor are universal at these often tiny offices in basements or away from the street on second floors, where cards are stacked on walls advertising jobs such as babysitting, construction, and dishwashing. In many cases, the agencies – generally run by immigrants – break wage laws or scam the newcomers, who are often undocumented.

“These guys popped up everywhere. It’s left and right, you look north, south, west, east, you see these agencies,” a state Assemblyman of Queens, Jose Serrano, said. “They make all these false promises that they can never deliver. These people get ripped off, mainly immigrants who don’t know better.”

Two years ago, Carlos arrived in Queens $9,000 in debt to the smugglers who guided him across the Mexican border. Just when he paid them off last fall, he lost his construction job. Desperate for work, he went to an agency, Power Employment. It asked for a fairly typical $100 deposit, which he paid, enticed by the lure of steady income after a frustrating search on his own. “When you go to one they say beautiful things – you can work wherever you want,” he said in Spanish.

On five different occasions, he said, he went to factories and construction sites where he was told he would find work. One site did not exist, and at the others he was told he did not qualify. “They say, ‘Come tomorrow, come tomorrow,’ and you get tired,” Mr. Ortiz, 39, said last week of the agency’s response.

Two weeks ago, the owner of Power Employment, Andres Lopez, an immigrant from Ecuador, closed shop. He said he was driven out of business by employees who arrive with false illusions and employers who abuse them.

“When the people come to this country, I don’t know who tells them they’re going to make a lot of money,’ Mr. Lopez said. “They think if they pay one agency, they’re going to have a job for $1,000.” The truth, he said, is that without a green card they cannot make more than $350 a week. (Carlos said he was told he would earn $350 to $400.)

Finding employers in search of illegal labor was simple, Mr. Lopez said. After combing through the Yellow Pages, he said he would make 100 phone calls and create a list of 10 jobs. The problem was wages: For example, restaurants in Manhattan typically expect a dishwasher to work Monday to Saturday, 12 hours a day, for a wage of between $300 and $320. Others would offer even less. “That’s the reality, and the people get upset about it,” he said.

Mr. Lopez said the problem is that he has no way to regulate his customers or the employers he is serving. “This is a jungle,” Mr. Lopez, an immigrant from Ecuador, said. “This is not a dignified business where you can work normally. I used to wake up and would be scared to exist.” Mr. Lopez said his customers at times would report to a job, stay for 30 minutes before deciding they did not like it, and return and ask for their money back. Others would alert all their friends about the work, rendering his service useless. Others, he said, would just “get lost” because they were new to the city.

The employers also would cause problems, he said, such as by calling up 10 agencies at once. Restaurants “when they have no dishwashers they get desperate,” he said. When his employee arrived to wash dishes, 10 other eager immigrants were already there, he said.

Still, Mr. Lopez denied he had failed to provide Carlos with employment, saying he was just one of those who was not satisfied with the work. Carlos, in turn, said he gave up on getting his money back from Mr. Lopez, after having been told he could only get a refund on Saturdays and then only 40%.

On Sunday, Carlos, trying to cobble together the $500 he sends each month to his wife in Colombia, searched without luck store-by-store, restaurant-to-restaurant for employment, as he said he is doing seven days a week. He said that when he sees leaflets offering jobs on almost every corner in his neighborhood he is puzzled by why the government allows the agencies to operate. Acknowledging he was breaking the law by seeking work, he said he felt the authorities were more to blame, “We come to this country out of necessity,” he said. “And they let them rob us, when we don’t know who to talk to, where to work.”

Three years ago, the state attorney general’s office launched an investigation into employment agencies such as Mr. Lopez’s after discovering they were feeding a steady stream of workers to companies that violated wage-an-hour laws. Since then, it has investigated 42 agencies. While the Department of Consumer Affairs licensed almost all of these, it has found widespread violations. The department itself, which said it has attempted to educate the public through outreach efforts such as translating the laws into 11 languages, received 231 complaints against employment agencies during the last fiscal year.

The most rampant infringement the attorney general’s office found was agencies referring clients to jobs paying less than minimum wage, which is against state and federal laws. Another frequent violation is customers who do not receive their deposit back if a job is not provided, or are overcharged. An agency must replace a deposit in full and cannot charge more than 10% of a month’s salary or 18% if it includes three meals and lodging.

Last week, clients of Tri-State Employment, a few blocks down Roosevelt Avenue in Queens from Power Employment, took the rare move of taking a petition filled with complaints – such as failure to repay the deposit and referrals to nonexistent job sites – to the Department of Consumer Affairs, which regulates such agencies.

The owner of the agency, Frank Machado, told The New York Sun last Tuesday that a crooked employee caused the problems and had been fired. That night, the immigrant from Colombia moved the agency out of the small office located in the back of a Jackson Heights mini-mall.

An upset customer discovered Mr. Machado on his way and out called the police, but by morning the company was gone. On Thursday, a woman answered Mr. Machado’s cell phone and said he would be opening another agency at a different site. Since then, he has not returned calls or answered the cell phone.

When alerted of the company’s closure, a spokeswoman for the Department of Consumer Affairs, Pauline Toole, said, “If they’ve now gone out of business, we will try and find them at some other point and hold them accountable, but it will be difficult to do so.”

This type of fly-by-night activity is typical of the industry, the deputy director of the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law, Annette Bernhardt, said. “I think the policy challenge is how do we regulate it, or how do we set up good public placement agencies so as not to exploit the workers,” she said.