I just this article on ABC News, and it made me sick. How teachers can think this is appropriate behavior and something that they should engage in is beyond me.
What passes for good judgment these days is incredible.
Hava
The $3000 check you should never cash July 15, 2006
Hey, my momma responded!!! Hey Mom! Everyone wave at my mom–she’s the one over there who looks an awful lot like me!!! 
She used to go to parent-teacher conferences and the teachers would come up to her, “Oh, you must be Havilah’s mom!” even though they had never even met her before. We just look that much alike. 
Okay, enough waving at the mom, I’ve got a serious rant coming on. I belong to the WAHM forum (WAHM = Work-at-Home Mom) and it seems like every day, people are posting “leads” and asking if this is a genuine job. This is a “lead” that was posted last night:
“I Received a letter in the mail today with a check for over $3000.00 from Secret Shoppers. I am suppose to go to Walmart and send a MoneyGram for the amt of $2945.00 and the serv. chrg of 75.00. And I will be pd 200 for training.
“I have 48 hours to do this. Today is Friday , with a check that is over two thousand dollars it takes a few days to clear. Has anyone done this before? I have been called twice to check if I rec. the info. from someone from the company. She even gave me a suprevisor name and number.”
Wow. My jaw dropped when I read this. This jobs SCREAMS scam to me. There are so many things wrong with this, I don’t even know where to start.
First of all, I am assuming that since this was a job for a company called “Secret Shoppers,” I have to assume that you are supposed to do this job so you can evaluate the way that the Wal-Mart employees interacted with you. I have been looking at getting into mystery shopping, and let me tell you, there isn’t a chance on this green earth that any legitimate MS company was going to pay you this kind of money ($200) to do a shop that would take all of 10 minutes. Strike number one.
Strike number two: MS companies have contracted to do a shop for a company (in this case, it would be Wal-Mart.) They have to make sure that they have shoppers that can cover the shop. They would not blindly send out checks to people, hoping that these people can do the shops by the deadline. If this really was a legitimate check for $3000 (which it most assuredly is not) then why would they take the chance that you will actually be home to do the shop?? It’s the middle of summer. You could be gone for two weeks on vacation. They wouldn’t send the check, THEN call you to make sure you could do the shop. That simply doesn’t make any sense at all.
Strike number three: $2045 + $75 does not equal $3000. If the company cannot do even simple math like that, then they obviously have something wrong with them. I don’t do well with math, and I can see that there’s a problem there, sans a calculator. That really says something.
Strike number four: If the company really was going to pay you $200 to do a 10 minute shop (bwaahhhahahaha!!!!) then why wouldn’t they just send you a check for $200 and tell you to cash that? Why go through this whole elaborate shenanigan?
Why? Because this is a scam. Scams rely on one thing every time: People making hasty decisions. You get this check. It is staring you in the face. $3000 right there. An extremely easy way to make $200. Do it! Do it! Phone calls from people, “Are you going to do this? Here is my sup’s number. Call! We’re legit! We need to know if you’re going to do this! Tell us your decision!” A legitimate company would not need to pressure you like that.
No decision should ever be made hastily when it comes to $3000. The need for haste, the need for pressure, comes because the company knows that if you sit down and think about what is going on, think this through logically, then you are going to see all of the problems associated with this “job” and go running in the other direction. They don’t want to give you that chance to think. As I told my hubby last night, there is a better chance of aliens landing in our front yard, a tornado hitting our backyard, lightning hitting our house and an earthquake hitting our truck, simultaneously! than this being an actual job.
There is a happy ending. I posted my thoughts, and the original poster responded:
Thank you all for your help and comments. I plan on taking this check to the bank that it is endorsed from and take to my local police dept. this is so sad and unfortunately how many people have they hurt. We are all looking for legit jobs to feed our families and its companies and people like this that make us suffer the most. Thanks to having caring people such as you all to look out for one another.
THANKS SOOOOOOOOO MUCH…
At least this is one work-at-home mom who won’t be taken for a ride. The next time you think you might be on the receiving end of a scam, stop, put the check out of sight, turn off your phone, and just THINK. Think it through logically. Scams don’t stand up against the Think Test. It is my theory that there are 17 people in this world who have come up with all of these scams, and they are just perpetuating them all over the internet. There are thousands of scams out there, so you would think that there are thousands of scammers, but I really think there are only 17. I originally said 2, but Doug negotiated me up to 17. Don’t make those 17 people’s lives any easier.
Here’s to ridding the world of those 17 and going back to living in peace and prosperity!
Havs
I almost got sucked in June 22, 2006
I was reading a thread on a WAHM forum about a company called Tiny Details, a company that has you assemble products from home. I went to their site and checked them out, and they seemed very legit. I know, I know, how could there ever be an assembly job at home that was legit? But this one DID sound legit (famous last words).
They have these kits that they send in the mail to you (postage paid both ways!) for miniature items. These are those really tiny replications that you can buy to put into a dollhouse. I know that miniatures are really big, so it only made sense that this was a hot item that could do well. Also, since it a craft, most people want a “handmade” craft, so this company was providing their clients (stores) a way to offer that to the customer. This wasn’t a “assemble CD cases from home” sort of thing where the product could easily be done by a machine (and with higher quality), but was instead a large assortment of really cute items that could go into a dollhouse: books, Victorian calling cards, food items, magazine racks, etc. I read through the list and they seemed easy enough. I was reaching for the credit card, when I thought, “You know, I should just double-check this.”
Here are the BBB reports on this company:
Here are some threads that I found that discussed Tiny Details in more depth:
WAHM forum thread #1
WAHM forum thread #2
By this point, I felt pretty stupid. I am not one to fall for scams easily. I have been around the block a few times, and when I heard about people falling for a scam, I just shake my head and think, “How could you not tell that was a scam? It was so obvious!” And yet, I almost handed over my credit card to a company that (as far as I can tell) absolutely no one has made any money with!
If someone like me, who is fairly intelligent (or so I like to think! *wink*) and can usually spot a scam from 100 feet away, almost fell for this, how many other people out there are also being taken in by them?
*Sigh*
Havs
So I got locked in the bathroom today… June 10, 2006
And it wasn’t even my own bathroom, at home. No, that would be much too easy, and so much less embarrassing. No, in typical Hava-style, I got locked into a bathroom, in someone else’s apartment.
It all started when a friend of mine offered to let me clean an apartment to make a little extra cash on the side. All nice and dandy, or so I thought. My friend manages a large apartment complex, and she happened to have an apartment come empty, that needed to be cleaned before the next tenant could move in. No problem! I hate cleaning (anyone who has visited my home can attest to that fact!) but getting paid to clean was another thing entirely. I went in, bucket in hand, and happily started scrubbing. The hubby of my friend, who does all of the maintenance on the building, had removed all of the doorknobs on every door in the apartment, thereby making it much easier to paint them all. They had long-since been painted, but the knobs had not been put back on yet. He left the metal part in the doors, the part that the knobs operate, but the knobs themselves were gone.
I didn’t pay much attention to any of that. I tend to be the sort of person who wanders around in my own la-la land, until something jerks me back down to earth. Sometimes that landing can be awfully hard, as I found out today. 
I took a quick break from cleaning, and went into the bathroom. I closed the door behind me, did my business, washed my hands and went to the door, thinking all the while about everything else that needed to be done. After a couple of seconds of standing at the door, I realized that the doorknob that I had been subconsciously grabbing for was not there. I looked down to where it should have been, where my hand had been grabbing just air and realized sure enough, there was no doorknob.
I didn’t panic, not at first. I laughed at myself for not realizing it sooner, and then I went about trying to get the metal parts inside of the door to move, to let me out. I am not in a habit of taking doorknobs apart and studying how they work (when was the last time you tore your door knobs apart?) so at this point, I was lost. I tried pushing, pulling, lifting up, twisting…nothing.
The panic starts to creep up a little bit more. I wasn’t completely worried, because I knew that somebody would come looking for me eventually, (hey, has anyone seen Hava today?) but I have never been the kind to sit around and wait for something to happen. Especially not when I am trapped in a bathroom that has no outside window. There was only way out of that bathroom, but I certainly wasn’t having any luck with that route.
I looked around the bathroom, evaluating my options. I could try switching the light on and off…and what? Annoy the fly that was flying over my head in dizzying circles? Right then, the fly goes through the hole in the door, where the doorknob was supposed to be at, and I stared longingly after it. That was the first time (and I imagine the last time!) I have ever wished I was a fly.
Uummm, I could try flushing the toilet over and over again! Yeeeaaahh, that wasn’t going to do a thing, except waste perfectly good water. Right then, I heard my friends walking around in the apartment above me. Luckily for me, the apartment I was cleaning was directly underneath the apartment that my friends live in. I knew I had to get lucky some day! But, how to get their attention? Staring at the ceiling certainly wasn’t doing the trick.
AH-HA! I spied the towel rack and knew I was in business. I quickly removed the rod and started hitting the roof of the bathroom with it. “DONOVAN!!!” I’m yelling. “DONOVAN, HELP ME!!!!!” Pound, pound, pound…
Nothing.
I am peering through the hole in the door, through where the handle was supposed to be at, and I see my friend’s child go running past the apartment. “ELIGH!!!!!” I screaming. Nothing.
Back to the rod I go. I am trying not to make any holes in the ceiling, because they may not be happy with me if I pound holes into their ceilings that they then have to fix, so I am trying to gently pound, if there is such a thing.
About 5 hours later (okay, maybe it was only 5 minutes later, but close enough!) I hear, “Havilah?” Salvation! Donovan had heard me! I start yelling, “In the bathroom! In the bathroom!” He opens up the front door to the apartment and just starts laughing. I thought he wouldn’t be able to make it across the room, he was laughing so hard.
Even though I was more than a little freaked out by that point (what happens if no one comes looking for me for a couple of hours? I have got better things to do than to stare at a toilet!) it suddenly hits me–this is freakin’ hilarious!!!!! I start laughing too, and by time Donovan got the door open, we were both laughing so hard we were having a hard time standing up.
The funniest part of all? I kept thinking, “I can’t wait to get home to write this in my blog!” And that is when I realized I was truly addicted to posting. Only 3 posts in, and I am already unstoppable.
Heaven help us all, eh?
Hava
Recent Comments