Thanks for the positive comments about Customer Impact on this thread. We all greatly appreciate it.
Unfortunately jaejaesmama, as the other posters have pointed out, what you received was a scam from people who pose as our company and many other reputable mystery shop companies. This has been an issue for over 2 years now, and seems to come in waves. They'll use our company name for a while, then another, and another, then cycle back.
We have received hundreds of calls from suspicious shoppers, we've seen the scam checks as our return address used to be on the mail these scammers send out, and we've reported it to the various authorities and Postal Inspectors and more. It's extremely frustrating that these folks are out there and hurting our name(and this industry for that matter).
However, one thing you can always guarantee, is no mystery shopping company will give you a check up front for anything. That's now how the industry works. So, as the old adage goes, "if it's too good to be true, it probably is."
Great job using the forum to question it before following through with trying to cash it. We encourage anyone who has questions about it to call our offices as well, and we've had a lot of folks do just that.
I'm sorry that your first impression of us was now soured due to the scam check, but we encourage you to sign up with us and hopefully we have some shops near you.
Thanks again for the great answers and support to the other posters.
Daniel Price
Project Manager, Customer Impact, LLC.
dprice@customerimpactinfo.com