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American Medical Association Mystery Shopping Recommendation
In June 2008, the The American Medical Association's Council on
Ethical and Judicial Affairs released a recommendation on the use of
"secret shopper patients" in the Medical / Healthcare. The
Recommendation: "Physicians have an ethical responsibility to engage
in activities that contribute to continual improvements in patient
care. One method for promoting such quality improvement is through
the use of secret shopper ˇ§patientsˇ¨ who have been appropriately
trained to provide feedback about physician performance in the
clinical setting." [6]
The most widely used set of professional guidelines and ethics
standards for the industry is ISO 20252[7] ratified in 2006.
Please help improve this section by expanding it. Further
information might be found on the talk page. (September 2008)
Fraud
There exists a scam that uses mystery shopping as a premise for
fraud, where a person is sent a bad check with a request to deposit
it into their bank account, wire a portion of the money through a
wire transfer company such as Western Union or MoneyGram and keep
the remainder as a mystery shopping fee, and informed to mail the
money immediately as the test is evaluating response time. People
who wire the "remainder" discover the check is bad and lose the
money they transfer and the wire transfer service fee in addition to
the total amount of the check, often leaving them in debt to their
banks.[8] One scam involved fraudulent websites using a misspelled
URL to advertise online and in newspapers under a legitimate
company's name.[9]
Valid mystery shopping companies will never send their clients a
check to cash prior to work being completed, and their
advertisements will usually include a contact person and phone
number. Checks received from mystery shopping companies should only
be in payment for work performed, and can always be taken to a bank
to be verified. Most fraudulent cheques sent out by scam artists can
be easily spotted and identified by a financial professional.
On February 3, 2009 The Internet Crime Complaint Center issued a
warning on this scam. http://www.ic3.gov/media/2009/090203.aspx
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