| Check fraud scam surfaces in Oregon |
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| Fraudsters pose as an employment agency seeking applicants to work as ‘secret shoppers’ |
| By David Sale A ring of fraudsters based in Canada is trying to make inroads in Yamhill County, it was discovered recently after this newspaper was contacted to advertise their scam. Calling themselves "Secret Research, Inc.," the fraudsters pose as an employment agency, seeking applicants to work as secret shoppers. The first task is supposedly to evaluate employees of the Moneygram money transfer service, available at Wal-Marts nationwide. To do so, victims are supplied with a bank draft for $2,990 and instructed to cash it at their local Wal-Mart, keep $300 as payment and send the balance to an address in New Brunswick, Canada, along with a form evaluating the clerk's service. Sound too good to be true? It is - the check is a forgery, according to Countryside Federal, the Syracuse, N.Y-based credit union which supposedly issued the document. President and chief executive officer Gerd Henjes said that four such false checks had already been returned to the company after attempts to cash them. Identical forged checks have also surfaced in Mobile, Ala., Las Vegas and several Pennsylvania cities, according to consumer watchdog groups. On Feb. 21, Canadian authorities announced the arrests of two scam operators, but estimated that hundreds of U.S. residents lost at least $150,000 to the scammers. Their accomplices remain at large. Known as "advance fee fraud," this type of scam can take various forms, from Ebay purchases to job offers, but all have a common element: the ploy is to get someone else to cash a fraudulent check and wire most of the money to the scammer, who is frequently located overseas. Moneygram is not federally insured, meaning that when the forgery is discovered and the bank transaction is reversed, the victim is liable for the balance. Last year, a Newberg woman fell victim to such a scam and also faced criminal charges for cashing a forged check - though her penalty was reduced to probation by a circuit court judge after the nature of the scam was revealed. While the official-seeming letter includes a telephone number to verify that the check is valid, a few minutes of research on the Internet have saved others from falling victim to the ploy. "I Googled Countryside and found the tollfree number from their Web site," reported a poster on an antifraud Internet site. "I called that number and stated to a rep that I was holding a cashiers check from their bank and needed to know if it was legit. Her first question: `Is it for $2990?' `Yup,' says I, and she assured me that it was a fraudulent item." Anyone who receives such a suspicious offer is advised to contact the financial institution directly, as well as the company which one has supposedly been hired to evaluate - in this case, Moneygram. For those interested in a real job as a secret shopper, the Dallas-based Mystery Shopping Providers Association offers information on how to register to be a mystery shopper with a member company, a database of available jobs, and additional information on the industry in general, through their Web site at www.mysteryshop.org. |