Mystery Shopper Scam Alert!

There has been many cases of people being contacted by someone claiming to be with a mystery shopping company offering employment out of the blue by email. I have actually received a couple of these emails myself. Having had worked for the sheriff's office I am required to proceed to try to get any information I can and turn it in. So I responded to this one of the emails and a couple of days ago I received an email just as it has been reported that there had been reports of rudeness etc at the local Western Union and I would need to secret shop there. I was also informed that I would receive a money order over $2000.00 and I should take it to my bank and deposit $200.00 as my commission then proceed to wire the remainder to another mystery shopper. Of course, I would be required to be completely secretive of my mission and report back upon completion. Now I don't have to be a bass fisherman to know that something smells fishy here and so I give it a few days and I receive another email. I already know this is a scam. First of all, usually if it seems to good to be true it is. Secondly, the mystery shopping companies do not send you monies in advance. These companies will pay you after you make your purchases and you have receipts to send to them. All sorts of alarms are going off, Is this money laundering or is this one of those scams I saw people go to jail for cashing checks that were not good? So many thoughts going through my head. So I did what I normally do in a situation where I don't know the answer. I looked it up on the Internet. Sure enough, there were lots of other incidents of the same kind. One poor lady had went to the bank and the teller didn't even tell her what was happening the teller just called the police and the lady didn't get to go home to her children that night. It is really sad and scary the things people do for money and they do it to the helpless and to people who they don't know what their situation is. On with my story. I had received an email to my AOL account and it said that UPS would be delivering a money order so I quickly devised a way to get a telephone number. Of course again there are so many ways that these numbers can be obtained that I cannot say if this will help the police or not but I have obtained as much information as I can. I am using Norton Antivirus and Firewall on my Hewlett Packard computer with hopes that maybe I have an IP address but I doubt it since they use a Gmail account which is a google service. All I can do is hope that when the money order arrives and I carry it to the police department, they take this seriously and do what they can to track these criminals down and prevent them from doing this to anyone else. I do feel this will be a Federal offense. I will keep you posted on the events. But for now please do be careful and watch for these crazy and sadistically evil culprits in your inbox.