A Whitehorse woman has been scammed $3,500 after participating in what she thought was a mystery-shopper job.

The woman, who asked not to have her name published, is telling her story to make other people aware of these frauds.

“Be careful,” she told the Star in a recent interview.

“It’s not as easy as it seems to make extra money,” she said of advertisements for making hundreds of dollars a week in exchange for rating service at local shops or purchasing specific goods.

Mystery shopping gigs are typically offered by market research companies, collecting data on service quality or availability of certain products in stores.

The woman received a $3,500 cheque in the mail last month from something called the Crystal Survey Group.

An accompanying letter asked her to visit a local bank, rate the service she received and keep $400 for doing so. She was instructed to send the rest of the money to an an Ontario bank account.

So she did.

She’d heard of mystery shopping previously, and didn’t think anything seemed out of the ordinary.

The woman also received texts from the phony survey group, and spoke to a man on the phone who wanted to ensure she received the cheque.

But the cheque bounced, and the bank sent $3,100 of her own money in its place.

The woman found out what had happened only after she unsuccessfully tried to mail a package to her daughters.

She thought something was wrong with her card, so she went to her bank, the Bank of Montreal (BMO).

A clerk there told her her account was overdrawn – “by a lot,” she said.

“I was just totally devastated; like, what the hell happened?”

The bank manager was apologetic, she said, but told her there was nothing they could do. She had to take money out of her savings and investments to cover the loss.

The bank waived service fees she was charged for the bounced cheque.

The woman now questions why the bank didn’t hold the cheque for a few days to ensure it was valid.

But Shirley Milligan, assistant branch manager at BMO, said if someone is a good client, he or she would have access to the funds right away.

Milligan said she’s seen this scam several times over the years.

People receive a cheque in the mail for a large amount of money – either more than what they’re selling an item for, or as payment for future services, like mystery shopping – then are told to deposit the money, keep a certain amount, and send the rest back.

“These are scams,” Milligan said. “People never give you more money than your item is worth. That’s the first red flag.

“But I know people are desperate. They want or need the money and they think that people are going to give it to them. They’re genuine, and they just can’t believe that someone would do them wrong. We have so many trusting people, and they get taken advantage of.”

If clients are suspicious of a cheque they receive in the mail, Milligan recommends they bring it in to a bank teller. The woman didn’t do that in this case.

“We can verify them, so we fax them to the bank that they’re drawn on, or we call the bank, and they can tell us within minutes if they’re fraudulent,” Milligan said.

The woman reported the incident to the RCMP, but they told her there was nothing they could do to recover her money.

She tried calling the phone number she was contacted at by the so-called survey group, but the voice mailbox was full.

Whitehorse RCMP Cpl. Natasha Dunmall said people should do some “secondary digging” when they receive communication that could potentially be a scam. She suggests Googling the company name on a cheque to see if others have identified it as fraud.

A Google search of “crystal survey group” turns up links for anti-scam websites.

“It really just goes back to that old adage: if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is,” Dunmall said.

“You need to protect yourself in today’s era of technology. We just have to be careful.”