"When I opened it and read it I thought they must be kidding," says Commerce resident, Carol Abernathy. Carol was looking for a way to make a few extra bucks on the side. She had done secret shopping before, so carol decided to look into it again. What Carol didn't expect is to receive a fairly hefty check in the mail, one that had fraud written all over it. "I immediately linked it with the conversation I had with the woman on the internet," says Abernathy.

Carol says the check was written in the amount of $2,480.00. She was to spend 70 dollars secret shopping at Wal-Mart, Sears, Lowes or Home Depot. Here's the catch: Carol was suppose to send $2,060.00 back to the company through Western Union. Carol knew this was not how secret shopping worked. "I've done mystery shopping for a couple of grocery stores and always before you would buy a bill of groceries that was less than twenty dollars and then you would send them the receipt for the bill and they would send you reimbursement for that and they would send you a check for somewhere around 20 bucks," says Abernathy.

She decided to take the check and the papers to her local bank in Miami, Oklahoma. That's when Carol's assumptions about the scam were right. "I gave her the original documents that I had gotten through the mail and she sent them to the bank's fraud department," says Abernathy.

While Carol waits to hear back from her bank's fraud department, I took action to try and track down those behind the scam. There was a number to call on the bottom of the letter that carol revived. I dialed the number and reached a company in Ontario, Canada. A representative who answered claimed his company was called 'National Market Survey,' not 'Nationwide Market Research,' the name stated on the letter. The representative said that the fraudulent company was using its number to make the scam seem real. He claims that authorities in Ontario are aware of the situation, but tracking down those behind the fraud is not easy. "They're overseas and they're just impossible to get," says Corporal Chuck Niess with the Joplin Police Department. "When they talk about these scams they're usually talking about scams on the elderly and I don't know which made me the maddest, the scam or the idea that that I had fallen into that category," says Abernathy.

Carol is not the only one to receive this type of scam in the mail. Coming up on Action 12 News at 10:00, Dustin Lattimer has the story of a Joplin couple, including what to do if you happen to receive the same type of scam in the mail.