Elite Marketing Group Mystery Shopper SCAM!

I’m really terrible about checking my mail. Sometimes I’ll go for several weeks without paying a visit to my trusty mailbox (I pay all my bills online, everything else is junk anyway) and today I had to finally empty out the box overflowing with coupons for pizza, junk mail, and those stupid coupons for Bed, Bath & Beyond. In addition to the usual, I found a letter addressed to me with a Canadian stamp and no return address. Hmm, I thought.

I opened up the letter to find a check for $2980.40 made out to me with a letter from Elite Marketing Group and a worksheet. The letter stated that Elite Marketing Group was a mystery shopping company and that they had selected me for a position with their company. Then the letter stated that I would be compensated $370.40 for “Employee Probationer Training Pay + Expenses” and all I had to do was deposit the check and take out the requested about of money. I was to spend $20.00 at Burger King and then rate their customer service, $75.00 at Wal-Mart and rate them as well, and then visit Western Union and setup a transfer for $2360.00 to go to TIFFANY BROWN, 140 LOWER MARCH, LONDON, UK SE1 7AE, plus a $155.00 transaction fee. Those amounts combined were what the check was made for.

I immediately knew this was fishy. I have done mystery shopping before for legit companies and NO ONE gives you thousands of dollars upfront and requests you make wire transfers to random people in another country. They also don’t request that you fax or email them the Western Union receipt to a fake email address (I Googled it, the domain name is a fake). I did a few minutes of research — it didn’t take long — and comfirmed it was a scam. There’s a couple of names I’m supposed to contact if I have questions so I believe “John Banks” and/or “Jessica Powell” at 1-866-971-7778 Ext. 20 will be getting a call from me next week. I’m sure it’s a fake number, but if it’s not my questions will be something like “why are you scamming me?”

If you’re not familiar with these sorts of scams, basically they want me to deposit this fake check, take out all the money, eat a healthy lunch at Burger King, stop on over a Wal-Mart and spend $75.00 and then send the rest of the money out of the country where there is no way that I will ever be able to get it back. So inevitably when my bank returns the check, I’ll owe the bank almost 3K because I sent all the money to Tiffany Brown in Lower Marsh. It’s a  pretty good scam really, but at least they could have put up a fake mystery shopping website or something. That would probably get more people sucked in.

Edited: October 10th, 2009