The cheque clears in three days and bounces in three weeks, and you are the one who owes the bank

It reads like easy seasonal money. You have been taken on as a mystery shopper. A cheque turns up for a few thousand, you pay it in, keep a couple of hundred as your fee, spend the rest on gift cards at a named store, then scratch off the backs, photograph the numbers and send them in with your report on how the shopping experience went.

Those numbers are the payment, and not to you. Once they have been photographed and sent, the balance can be drained in minutes from anywhere on earth. The cheque, meanwhile, is forged. Banks are obliged to make deposited funds available within a few days, but a forgery can take weeks to be spotted, and when it is, the amount comes straight back out of your account. You have already spent it. You owe it.

Daniel Irwin of BBB Mid-South says these offers resurface every autumn "as people are looking for side jobs or seasonal income", and that the holiday uptick starts earlier every year. The FTC states the rule about as flatly as it can be stated: never agree to deposit a cheque to buy gift cards and send the numbers back, as part of a mystery shopper job or any job. Real mystery shopping does exist. It is part-time pocket money, and it never opens with an unsolicited cheque through the letterbox.

Report what you see at bbb.org/scamtracker. Honestly, none of this is a computer problem and no software is going to rescue you from it; the rule about never passing on money out of a deposit you did not earn is the entire defence. The one point where it does become a computer problem is the variant that asks you to install a reporting app before you start, and Tendvane's Safety check will tell you what has recently appointed itself to your PC.