Got this weird mail the other day and I just wanted to ask you guys if you know anything about secret shoppers and how legit this specific offer sounds. Here’s a quick breakdown:
At some Shoppers Drugmart locations there’s a Canada Post and a Moneygram International inside of the store. Moneygram has had too many customer complaints about their service and apparently there’s some internal audit being done to evaluate the consumer performance levels.
This study is sponsored by INVIS Inc. and basically they’ve sent me 2 identical cheques, both made out to me in the amount of $1472.55. 2 cheques are for two separate secret shopping times.
So after calling the contact and asking about the breakdown they’ve provided, they basically want me to deposit the 1472.55 in my account. They then want me to withdraw 1207.55 in cash. I am then supposed to go to a Shoppers with a Moneygram inside of it and send this cash to a ‘friend’ (I called and they gave me details of that too). The whole time I’m supposed to observe the rep and after fill out a survey which they also sent. I then fax this survey to them afterwards.
I would be charged $65 for the service fee of sending the 1207.55 as well. This leaves me with $200 in my bank account, which is mine to keep for doing the secret shopper deal.
The lady also said I could potentially do this up to 4 times if I wanted. So right now I have the chance of doing this twice, which would give me $400.
Question is…do I have anything to lose at all from this!? besides my time and gas of course.
I figure as long as I keep receipts showing bank transactions and receipts from the Moneygram office, as well as the original letter assignment, and as long as I report this for income tax then there’s no way I could get scammed into anything? Normally I’d just forget about this and just throw it away but I’m sort of in debt right now so this seems pretty appealing.
Any advice or help would be much appreciated…thanks guys.
i don’t know if this helps your situation at all but secret shoppers are real. i used to work at HMV and we’d get “secret shopped” once a month. most times you wouldn’t even know it was happening, although i caught on a few times. we’d get in shit if we didn’t keep the score up.
that said i could see how some people could use a set-up like that to con people…but i don’t see how in this case. but be careful anyways, sucks but you can’t trust anyone these days. good luck either way!
Sounds a bit like a scam to me… cuz i mean realistically what is stopping you from just putting all the money in the bank and keeping it?
What is probably the deal is they want you to put the money in your account then when you take the rest out after a while the bank will realize that the 1472 was never actually from the original cheque holder and youll have to come up with the money you took out and sent to your “friend”.
Additional Info from Wiki Mystery Shopping Website:
Fraud
"There exists a scam that uses mystery shopping as a premise for fraud, where a person is sent a bad check with a request to deposit it into their bank account, wire a portion of the money through a wire transfer company such as Western Union and keep the remainder as a mystery shopping fee, and informed to mail the money immediately as the test is evaluating response time. People who wire the “remainder” discover the check is bad and lose the money they transfer and the wire transfer service fee in addition to the total amount of the check, often leaving them in debt to their banks.[7] One scam involved fraudulent websites using a misspelled URL to advertise online and in newspapers under a legitimate company’s name.[8]
Valid mystery shopping companies will never send their clients a check to cash prior to work being completed, and their advertisements will usually include a contact person and phone number. Checks received from mystery shopping companies should only be in payment for work performed, and can always be taken to a bank to be verified. Most fraudulent cheques sent out by scam artists can be easily spotted and identified by a financial professional."
Seriously, you guys are the reason why these scum continue to do this and pray on the elderly.
too make it clear. there are actual people hired to be secret shoppers. i should know since my old work almost gave me that position. however in your case it sounds like a scam due to how they want you to handle the money. in most cases the secret shopper would a) not be required to buy anything but just window shop and fill out a form after they leave the store or b)buy something with your own money but instructed to return the item after to be credited the amount.
Sorry for being ignorant…I too have heard of secret shoppers before but this one seemed particularly fishy because of the money handling part. I’ve heard of people who have a list of things to pick up and they go pose as a customer and get rewarded for that and stuff. I’m pretty sure those people are also told to maybe ask a few certain questions and note the responses.
As for the NSF part of it, I was going to deposit it into my bank and just wait a good week or so to see what would happen. But say it were to all go into my account and I verified this with my bank that everything was clear, I’m not very inclined financially, but is there still a way for it to be NSF’d at some future date? I clearly wasn’t going to go deposit it and withdraw the 1200 right away that’s pretty retarded. I just wanted to see that the funds would stick first and then decide what to do.
Anyway, yeah thanks 240fanatic. I posted this last night before I crashed but found that same link this morning. So many scams lately it seems…I got that used car insurance call last week too wtf!
yeah no it’s all good. it was too good to be true but I personally wanted to see what would happen if i deposited the cheque that’s all. I dropped off the letters and cheques i got to the local pd…they apparently have a group investigating in burlington so they said they’d forward the stuff to them.