I was so excited when I opened my mail the other day. Someone sent me a cheque for $3,994.97. Out of the blue! Can you imagine such good fortune?  Well, me neither. Here’s the gist of the deal. Apparently I chosen to work as a “secret shopper” and this was the money I needed to do that. Most of the money was to be used “testing” a retail store and a money transfer institution. $450 of the money was for me to keep as probationary training fee. Of course, if I handled this test procedure well, there would be plenty of opportunity for me to make loads more money. How exciting! Right now I should say that this is somewhat insulting. The very idea that I should need any training to work as a shopper is simply ludicrous. The directions told me to deposit this cheque, make a purchase at a store and report back. The other part of the assignment was to transfer large amounts of money to 2 people and report back on the transactions. Here are exerts from the correspondence and a photo of the cheque.

cheque detail

letter pt.1

letter pt.2

service agreement

As this all sounded too easy and too good to be true, I started talking to people to get their views on what seemed like a “get rich quick” scheme. Everyone agreed this was probably the case. There were numerous clues that this was not legit, starting with the fact that they said they had reviewed my résumé and references. I can’t even remember the last time I wrote out a résumé! The cheap looking letterhead and cheque were identified as coming from a paper company in eastern Canada. I looked them up online and couldn’t find anything that talked about customer service evaluation. I decided to contact the company to tell them of my incredible correspondence, and to see if they were aware of the use of their name in this proposal.  (I’m not including the name of the company because they are in no way responsible for this promotion.) Within a few hours, I received a response:

“Thank you very much for contacting us Terri.  You are correct and this is a scam.  Please do not try to cash the cheque.  Our local authorities have been contacted and are investigating the situation.”

So there, in a few sentences, went my big chance to get rich quick. Oh well, back to work.

13 thoughts

  3. my word these scams get more and more elaborate… I still get emails from lotto companies telling my I have won $15million, except I need to pay them $1000 to get the $15 Million…. Pretty good going when I have never bought the ticket in the first place.

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  5. This is their way of obtaining access to your bank account so they can clean it out. It’s a felony in the US and both the Postal Inspectors and FBI investigate these frauds.
    Oh but the idea of spending someone else’s money is just delicious!
    Hillary

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  7. Phewww….just one more attempt to divert you from your ‘creative mission for 2013’. All the more time for the studio. Now if it had of been an offer to shop Saks 5th Ave, Barney’s or even Holts with some serious money…what were they thinking?

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