Hello,
My name is Ashley, I am with Secret Shopper (www.secretshopper.com). We have had a influx of emails and phone calls about money being taken out of shoppers bank accounts.
I would like to prevent this from happening to anyone else, which is why I am posting here regarding this matter.
We (Secret Shopper) do not and have never taken any money out of any banking accounts, and when signing up with our website it is not even an option to enter any account numbers.
There is a fraudulent 'company' with a website that is impersonating us, but taking the 'e' out of Shopper in Secret Shopper. They notoriously charge shoppers $10/month to use their 'services', but give the shopper no option to cancel their account or stop the payments. Any legitimate mystery shopping company will NEVER ask you for any payment. We all know some shops require a purchase to complete the shop, this is always paid out by the mystery shopping company in a form of a deposit into your account for reimbursement, never withdrawn from your account.
I want shoppers to be aware of this scam, and if it has happened to you and you are currently signed up with this 'company', please call your banking institution to have it flagged as fraud, as well as your local police departments (non emergency line) to report it. You can also report the website to the FTC at [reportfraud.ftc.gov]
Again, our website is www.secretshopper.com, we do not have another website beyond this one. If you have any questions or inquiries at all, please feel free to email me at ashleyb@secretshopper.com.
To find legitimate mystery shopping companies that you would like to sign up for, a great website is
[mspa-americas.org], or the list of mystery shopping companies that are posted on this website.
Thank you,
Ashley B

Thanks for posting this. I am amazed at all the different types of fraud that criminals spend their time on.

Even if you are a shopper and you decide to go with direct deposit, it would be wise to give them a dummy account where you don't keep anything in it, so they can't take anything from it. I have an account specifically for shopper payments. If they hit that account, it won't have anything in it. You can probably also have it set up at the financial institutions to NOT allow external debits meaning that only money can be deposited or xferred to another account (tied to you of course). Then there is no possibility of money being withdrawn.

Sucks that people get scammed. I know some of these scammers are getting more sophisticated, but some if it falls on the consumer/shopper as well. It's your money. You need to be smart about what you're doing and who you give your info out to.

It's definatley unfortunate, and we do our absolute best to be transparent with our shoppers and we put shoppers safety and data security first. We will be offering online payments very soon, and have been working diligently to make sure all of your data and information stays private. We would not release a method that would put anyone at risk!

This is a great idea, and you can ACH/transfer it to another account that you have for savings or everyday monies.

I suggest reporting them to their domain registrar and website hosting company. Legit web service companies don't want to be known for hosting scams.

The domain secretshoppr.com is registered through NameCheap. You can file an abuse report here: support.namecheap.com

Choose submit a ticket.

The website is hosted by Amazon Web Services. Reports of sites abusing their services may be submitted to abuse@amazonaws.com

Include a link to this post and make sure to mention bank fraud in your messages.

And the truly sickening part of this is the scammers make more than we shoppers!

@Susan L. wrote:

Thanks for posting this. I am amazed at all the different types of fraud that criminals spend their time on.