Just got and email that I believe is a scam… from all indications…
The wording is pretty bad, once clicked on the return it goes to another email not the ucsc.edu email…
Checking online there are mentions of scams like this that say they will send you the money… you cash the money order at your bank, go shop for some items, notify them back and fill out a review… then asked top send the remainder of the money on to someone else via western Union??? and then you find out the original money order was a fake and they money is taken from your account and the cash you sent on to someone else? … DUH!…
What I did was immediately set up a “Do Not Trackme” email address… and use that in my return/from emails… sent an email to the ucsc.edu account listed and got an immediate bounce that it did not exist… pretty much says this was a scam… so best to just delete it all…
As the link says, most legitimate deals will not send a large amount of money, will not pay you the $200 or $250 to do this one shopping… in fact it would likely be more like very limited amounts of money paid, after you have shopped and filled in the review… They also most likely will have legitimate websites and phone numbers to contact…
I did get into a secrete shopper thing 30 years ago… don’t remember how we got the offer but one summer we got a deal to attend a local drive in movie. The company which had a legitimate mail address and phone number, sent us free passes to the movie of their selection. We were to count the cars that attended and estimate the number of people per car, visit the snack area and make comment about what was available and how active it was… then fill out the paperwork and mail it back in. Then they would send us $10 extra dollars for our troubles… got to do that 3 times as I remember and got 3 free drive in movies… not getting rich and it was some work to count cars, etc. but not a lot of work and we got to see some decent movies… seems like the only really good one was “up in smoke” the others were not memorable…
WD0AJG