Typical mystery shoppers are signed up with dozens of mystery shopping companies, and our inboxes may be flooded with hundreds or thousands of emails about open mystery shops every month. If a company sends you a bunch of offers and you never accept one, will they blacklist you and stop offering shops?
First of all you need to know that you are not the only shopper getting those emails. Each notification is going out to many other shoppers in your area. It is not necessary to respond to the emails and say that you are not interested. You only need to take action if you want the assignment.
Even if you respond and say that you are interested in doing the shop you are not guaranteed the assignment. The email went out to hundreds of other shoppers in your area, and one of them may get the shop.
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The question of who checks up on the mystery shoppers gets asked a lot. It would be extremely unlikely that a company would send two shoppers in to a business at the same time so that one could check on the other (or the reports could be compared), but there are techniques that mystery shopping companies use to check the accuracy of reports or determine if the shopper may not be doing a thorough job.
This is a guest post from C. McDaniel of 
Each time you apply to a mystery shopping company, you fill out a shopper profile. The profile includes your contact information, demographic information about you (e.g., birthdate, gender, marital status, etc.) as well as specific things the mystery shopping company needs to match you to client requirements. These questions might include the ages of your children, if you own a digital camera or voice recorder, if you wear glasses, etc. Of course, MSPA member companies will want to know your MSPA certification status.
Question from a mystery shopper:
A simple definition of karma is that what you put out comes back to you. If you do good things, you receive good things in return. And if you do bad things, you can expect negative consequences.
You always do your best as a mystery shopper…until that one day. Maybe you didn’t get an important bit of information for the shop, or you went on the wrong day, or at the wrong time or to the wrong place. Or you completely forgot to do the shop.
As secret shoppers, we “check up” on employees to make sure they are following the policies and procedures set by their employers. But who checks up on us, to make sure we are doing our jobs properly?