USEFULNESS, FROM ALBANY

No, not from the state government; David Paterson's doing some interesting things (that you can read about over at knockatize) but I'm not ready to make that leap just yet.

What I'm on about is a pair of articles from today's Albany Times Union on the mystery-shopper scam:

Another reader received a check from an operation calling itself Shopping Evaluation Inc. of Detroit. Colonie resident Wade Champagne did not take up the offer by depositing the funds; he had his boss contact me to help confirm his suspicions. “I thought it was too good to be true and it was,” said Champagne, a Colonie insurance agent.

I spoke to Pam Davids, who called herself Champagne’s “head assignment coordinator” in her letter to him. But when I got her on the phone to ask why she sent Champagne a check for $4,996, she claimed she was just a worker at a call center in Detroit, who answered calls for many mystery shopper firms. "Apparently we’ve had a problem with a couple of them,” said Davids, when I told her I was investigating a scam. She said she would ask her superiors to call me, but no one has.

And of course Craigslist is crawling with mystery-shopper and other scams, as are many of our local job sites and newspaper classifieds from time to time. The T-U provides some good hints on how to spot a mystery-shopper scam - and what's really useful about that link is there's also a rundown on the mystery-shopping outfits that are legit. The comments are useful too.

Once I looked into it, it didn't seem like something I'd be able to hack what with having Beast around to throw off schedules in his adorable way, but for somebody in the right frame of mind perhaps it'd be doable.