Sometime back I had written about a scam called Master Research Inc., a company that swindled money from people by promising them employment. Those who fell for the scam were given to understand that they would be working as secret shoppers testing the payment mechanisms of large shopping malls.
They had gone underground, it was believed, when the going got too hot. Now, it seems, they have resurfaced after a name-change as Secret Shoppers Inc.
Sign that the scam was alive and kicking were received last week. Nancy Timmerman, after responding to an employment ad in the local paper, received a job offer from a company calling itself Secret Shoppers Inc.
Part of the job, she was told was to check the effectiveness and efficiency of Wal-Mart’s money gram facility. For this, the company sent her a check for nearly $2, 700 drawn on Pioneer Federal Credit Union, Nampa Branch.
She was told to cash the check and then send part of the money using Wal-Mart money grams back to the company.
Nancy confessed, for a moment she was almost taken in by the scam. She was out of work and desperately looking for a job. Under such circumstances, the company and its job offer looked so legitimate. Then, she had heard about such scams operating in the internet world. It took time for her to realize such scams can and were being run in the ‘real’ (read offline) world too.
She took the check to the Nampa Branch of the bank. They told her the check was a fraud. In fact, over a week they had collected three more such checks, two of them very similar to what Nancy had on hand.
Nancy wished others will be alerted by the incident:
“I just want people to know about this because I don’t want some else to be sucked by it that’s as desperate for work as I am”, she said.