‘Mystery shopper’ crooks preying on vulnerable jobless

Mrs E.E. writes: My husband applied for a job as a mystery shopper in answer to an advert on a jobs website. He received a letter with instructions along with a cheque for £4,800. It looks too good to be true – could it be a scam? WELL spotted. You are absolutely right. This is a nasty scam that preys on jobseekers and can get them into serious trouble or leave them hugely in debt.

Your husband thought he was dealing with an organisation called ‘Shops-World’. There are genuine businesses with similar names, but this one is far from legitimate. The cheque your hus- band received looks quite official. It is drawn on a Barclays bank account and carries the address of a Barclays office in London.

The accompanying letter says your husband should deposit the cheque in his own bank account and then with- draw the lot in cash, keeping £400 as commission. He should then go to the Tesco store nearest your home and spend £50 on his choice of goods. These would be his to keep, but he is supposed to email a mystery shopper report, describing Tesco’s ‘customer service professionalism’.

As a second assignment, your husband is asked to go to any shop offering MoneyGram services for sending cash abroad. His task is to hand over £2,920 for transmission to another supposed mystery shopper who will then report on how quickly and safely the money is received.

The letter warns: ‘At the MoneyGram store, under no circumstances should you acknowledge that you are evaluating their services’. It adds: ‘If or when asked if you are a mystery shopper, answer NO. If or when asked if you know the recipient, answer YES.’

Of course, both these answers would be a lie. The cash was to be sent to a MoneyGram shop in Manila in the Philippines to be collected by a ‘Caro Sutton’ – someone your husband has never heard of. And of course, the whole mystery shopper exercise has absolutely nothing to do with MoneyGram or Tesco.

So how does the scam work? I showed the cheque to officials at Barclays’ head office. They told me: ‘This is an altered cheque. The account it relates to closed many years ago, so it is possibly a copy of an original cheque.’ In short, the cheque is a fake, but it looks real enough for it to be accepted across the counter. It would take a while to be detected, and in the meantime your husband’s account would appear to be £4,800 better off. The fraud- sters were hoping that before the bank spotted the bogus cheque, your husband would have sent £2,920 to the Philippines. Only later would Barclays have reversed the credit, leaving your husband’s account £4,800 poorer.

For many jobhunters, the £2,920 would be an impossible debt to repay and some might well find themselves facing awkward questions and having to explain to the police how they came to bank a forged cheque.