Has someone offered you a huge sum of money or a valuable consignment? It's a 419 or advance fee fraud - find out how they work, and what to do to be safe.
by Robert Fri Feb 18, 2011 5:30 pm
Besides the general means of inspecting solicitations, another way to help discern phony mystery shopping jobs is to become familiar with the real thing, which I learned about as a byproduct of a scam solicitation.

I first responded to an online ad for mystery shopping by a scammer who was a bit more sophisticated than others in that he appropriated the name of a legitimate mystery shopping business, Bare International. Nothing terrifically novel about that, lots of scammers will steal names and Web content from legitimate businesses. Once I discovered the discrepancies, I decided to get on the mailing list of the legitimate firm. Although I haven't, and probably never will, take one of their assignments, I did read enough of their literature to become familiar with their procedures. Later I did some unrelated work with a retiree who also did secret shopping for a number of firms.

The tricky part is that many mystery shopping assignments really do entail your working for the mystery shopping firm without ever meeting them face to face, and really do require you to make a purchase with your own cash or credit card. That's what makes it so plausible for an advance fee scam. And yes, at least from what I've seen from the assignments offered by Bare, many of the "shops" (assignments) really are for financial institutions such as banks! So how does anyone legitimately in that business -- either as the mystery shopper or the investigating firm -- get the nerve to trust that it's not a swindle?

The main way is pretty simple: They keep the amount of money at risk small. A simple way to distinguish scam from real mystery shopping offers is that the scammers offer on the order of 10 times the pay the real ones do. Not having any idea of the market at first, I had no way to know whether the scam solicitation was reasonable. However, it turns out that mystery shopping is basically a way to earn pin money, not to make a living. The assignments are like little favors that you wouldn't go far out of your way to do. An organiz'n like Bare has a large e-mail list; an assignment offer might be something like, "Are you going to the airport in the next 5 days? Here's a way to earn enough for a drink while you're at it. We have a client...."

The second way they earn your trust is (at least with Bare) that for your very first assignment they have an arrangement such that your money would not be at risk. I forgot exactly how they arranged it, but you'll see if you ever register and ask to be considered for an assignment.

They do have an escalating pay scale for more specialized assignments, for which one qualifies by having a certain experience rating with them as earned by other assignments. However, I've never seen evidence that the pay would become as lucrative as the scammers' offers would suggest.

There's another borderline scam by businesses online that offer to rent or sell you membership in a stable of potential employees for mystery shopping (or other consumer research assignments), or to subscribe to a list of firms making use of the services of mystery shoppers. Believe me, that information just isn't that valuable! They have a little disclaimer that employment is not guaranteed and that the amounts of money represented by their ads may not be typical, so I guess it's legal, but I don't think it's out of bounds for me to characterize such offers as at least scammish; I don't believe they sincerely think they're selling you value for value.

Robert
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