I was surprised that 50 people were willing to write a $2,700 check.
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Bryan Company Warns About Mystery Shopping Check Scam
BRYAN - Mystery shopping is a popular way to make a little extra money but scammers are using a local Bryan company's name to conduct an illegal business of their own.
News 3 takes a closer look at how mystery shopping is supposed to work and what you can do to avoid being conned.
The checks and logos look real but Mike Green, President of Customer Impact, says his business is not writing these checks.
"You can see that they used my logo," Green said.
Customer Impact pays people to give reviews and surveys of businesses and then analyzes that data to help make the businesses better.
"Nobody that I know of sends out email solicitations. Typically it's mystery shoppers trying to come to us. We get 800 applications a month so we don't really need to go out and look for people," Green said.
The scam started a few years ago. Victims are sent fake checks and asked to wire or send back part of the difference after shopping.
The Better Business Bureau of the Brazos Valley got involved in August when people in Bryan/College Station were first targeted
A couple months later, the scam took a strange twist. Customer Impact started getting checks intended for the scammers because the scammers, for some reason, gave the victims the real company's address
"We received 50 packets in one day from UPS and we opened each one of them and they had a check for $2,700, so that's over $100,000 in checks that we called the postmaster and handed to them that got their attention," Green said.
While mystery shopping is a legitimate business you should never have to pay money to be a part of it.
Bill McGuire with the Better Business Bureau says they never caught the scammers. They are not believed to be local as some of the cases have been traced to Africa.
"The key red flag Clay is always if you get a check that's for something you didn't enter or whatever it is. They're strangers who sent it to you you weren't expecting it and they want you to run it through your bank account and then send them some money, either wire or a check back, whatever it's a scam," McGuire said.
"It is crazy how widespread it is. We'll get a call from Seattle one day, New York one day it's all over the country. We're really not sure how they're getting the names to start with," said Green.
Customer Impact has alerted the FBI and Federal Trade Commission.
Customer Impact also suggests researching companies you get suspicious mail from and with emails be aware if they are from accounts like Gmail, or Yahoo, instead of a corporate email account.