Scammers succeed by getting their victims to trust them. This is true for secret shopper scams, lottery scams, pigeon drops, home repair scams or any other type of scam.
Getting potential victims to trust them is easier than you might think. For one thing, honest people may not understand how scams work, and may be less likely to spot the signs of a scam. And most people expect others to act as they do. Because most people are basically honest, they expect that others they encounter will also be honest. Scammers use that against their victims.
Let’s look at some typical scammer tricks and how they are used in secret shopper scams.
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I get emails every day asking about this or that email that someone received, or a company or some specific offer. What concerns me about some of these emails is that people are asking the wrong questions. They ask things such as, “Is XYZ Company a legitimate mystery shopping company?,” overlooking the fact that the email or check they got isn’t really from XYZ Company.
Yes, you read that right. The victim of a mystery shopper scam was arrested and put in jail.
If you have gotten one of those checks for thousands of dollars from someone representing themselves as a mystery shopping company, you are about to be scammed. Unless, of course, you follow the advice in this article.
The mystery shopper 
The people running mystery shopper scams are getting more sophisticated. Because more people are becoming aware of the scams, some of the scammers are making an attempt to look more like legitimate mystery shopping companies, and that can include putting up a web site with a professional appearance.