Mystery Shopping and How It's Become a Blessing and Curse in a Bad Economy

While Mystery Shopping is Essential to Keeping an Eye on Good Business, Desperate Jobseekers Are Taking Scam Jobs

While mystery shopping has become a lot more sophisticated now, those early days of the job were even easier than they are now. All the customer had to do was interact with employees, buy a product, then fill out a questionnaire after leaving the store asking how the service was as well as the store complying with business rules and regulations. It's not much different now, except now people even bring in secret cameras or audio equipment to certain businesses to capture details a questionnaire can't.

That above procedure comes close to something called sousveillance, which is something I wrote about here on August 14 of this year. In that procedure, private citizens take secret cameras into businesses to make sure businesses give the proper service, or those secret videos end up on the net for millions to see on Youtube or on the increasing sousveillance blogs popping up in cyberspace. Some might find it strange that people would do that for free when mystery shopping jobs pay you. No matter your decision on wanting to stay in the underground or have substantial employment, mystery shopping and sousveillance has kept our nation of retail stores on their toes. And when that happens, we get more order in a chaotic economic universe.

However, when crooks out there start advertising sham mystery shopper jobs, the worry might start about whether jobseekers will stop applying for these types of jobs out of fear of losing more funds than potential gain.

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In my local media at the time of this writing, a woman in my hometown applied for a mystery shopper job online that looked as legitimate as any other. Even after being told that she had to do a wire transfer of a check containing a portion of her earnings, she thought the check was legit based on quick check with her bank. Only after she received an alert that her bank account had an overdraft charge did she realize that this was a scam to beat all scams and the company took everything she earned plus putting her in debt. To add to the horror, the debt totaled over $3,000 in this scam--hence putting her in major financial dire straights after already struggling.