Mystery Shopper Scams still exist

There are a few things you can always depend on. Light travels at 299,792,458 meters per second in a vacuum. Objects at rest will remain at rest unless acted upon by an outside force. “Cash this check and wire the money back to me” always equals “scam.”

I haven’t written about it in a while, but the old Mystery Shopper Scam and its variations are still out there. It’s time for a review.

The “classic” version of this scam starts with a job offer emailed out of the blue. If you respond to this message, you’ll be immediately “hired” as a Mystery (or Secret) Shopper. A cashier’s check for a fairly large amount of money (the old ones always seemed to be around $2,900, but there is a lot of variation) will arrive a short time later, with these instructions:

  1. Cash this check at your bank, keeping $100 or $150 for yourself
  2. Take the rest of the cash to the nearest Western Union location
  3. Wire it back to me
  4. Report on the customer service at Western Union

If you follow those instructions, a few days later you will be informed that the check you deposited was counterfeit and that you are now on the hook for the money you received in exchange. Unfortunately, you already wired that money to a stranger and can’t get it back.

Now, things are getting a little more difficult for the scammers. Financial institutions are placing more holds on cashier’s checks and are asking more questions to protect their customers, and after being slapped with a $586 million settlement for essentially letting these scams proliferate for so many years, Western Union is finally doing more to prevent this type of fraud.

But that only means this scam has evolved to work around these problems. Instead of Western Union, some versions involve prepaid gift cards (“cash the check, then buy iTunes gift cards and relay the numbers and PIN to me”), overpaying for purchases from online classifieds (“just wire the extra back to me”) or targeting businesses instead of individuals.

Still, the basic mechanism remains: if someone gives you a check and requests that you convert it to cash (i.e. placing the liability for that check’s authenticity on you, then transfer the money back to them electronically, they’re attempting to steal from you. Regardless of the initial pitch, the pattern holds true. Don’t fall for it.





Now let’s see if you can guess what happens next:



