I received a cashier's check today in the amount of $3784.00 drawn on REGIONS BANK. The address on the letter is from Wilmington, DE. But the postmark on the envelope is from CANADA! The check itself had BRANCH TX under the so-called Authorized Signature, which appears to be S BARNES. This check was VERY REAL-LOOKING!
The letter that came with it stated to deposit the check, then go to WESTERN UNION or MONEY GRAM and transfer $3200.00 to one of the four names listed in the letter. Then I was to complete the survey about the services I received. I was then to go to either Wal-Mart, K-Mart, Home Depot, Lowes, JC Penney, or Sears and buy $85.00 worth of merchandise and report on my experience. I could also keep everything I bought!
$300.00 was to be my pay for doing the mystery shopping, and the $199.00 left out of the $3784.00 was for service charges.
Given these hard economic times, my first thought was WOW this is great! But I decided to do a little research on this first. Thank goodness I did! I saw of course the several posts here on Ripoff about this company, but then I found on Googling CONSUMER RESEARCH PLC an article from a Florida newspaper dated just 6 days ago.
Www.bradenton.com/news/local/crime-and-courts/story/1137992.html
It stated that how the scam works is you deposit the check, go to Western Union and do the transfer, then the shopping. The transfer is complete... The other guy has his $3200.00. All of this is done BEFORE you realize the check is no good, then YOU owe the bank ALL of that money PLUS the fees.
If you get one of these checks, CALL YOUR LOCAL POLICE AND REPORT IT! If enough people report this and the Canadian officials are alerted, maybe these scammers can be stopped!
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