Avoid Non Paying Gig Work 1: ATH APC Mystery Shopping Company and Alternative (When Their President Approved the Lie and Non Payment)
- C Catchings
- Dec 20, 2023
- 4 min read
This is a company that does evaluations with the help of independent contractors. They will also lie and deceive to avoid paying you. I had the opportunity to find this out personally (though their current score of 1 on Glassdoor could have told me earlier). It was not my first time working for them. Years ago, everything went smoothly. In 2023, it was a new deal: a robbery. And when I emailed the President and Public Relations Specialist overseeing this company, things just got better.
They gave me proof, because after that, the company started lying with (new) photographic evidence.
What they did next was get the person who was avoiding responding to me in the scheduling form, the scheduler C. B., and, in this case, "editor:" in charge of assessing my evaluation, to finally contact me. And when she did contact me, she or, sadly, someone even higher up, had removed part of the data I had sent to them, and said I'd only sent half. This was now their excuse for non-payment.
Non Payment:
It all started when they told me to get back in touch by email for an upgrade to their evaluation form. And this was after that company and my payment email address were also returning only blocked emails.
This kind of upgrade or edit is typically done in the form. And, in fact, they had already had me do an upgrade in that form, for the very same job and evaluation.
Now, this is a very detailed method that they used to avoid a payment in my case.
When I contacted the BBB, I found out this was not their first time using the evaluation, as one type of method they have to avoid payment. They managed to get both my review and another review removed. And they sit in the audience of the number one mystery shopping board online (ready to attack anyone who says a negative word about them or their top schedulers).
Former workers suggest non payment from ATH results from any evaluation that reflects poorly on the company. And in this case, it is not true, as the evaluation was largely positive, though, it was not perfect, as they did not do a perfect job.
A lot of these companies are fairly small. This one boasts about 45 people on staff.
Their attack on me was in three essential parts.
"Coincidentally," I had been having an issue with another scheduler (B. R.) who refused to remove shops I attempted to cancel well ahead of time, a requirement for good scores on their board, and afterward my email was not able to get through to any email in their system. In what appeared to be an attempt to bring my scores down, which were fairly good, that former scheduler would wait until the shop had been due, ignoring all of my attempts, both in the scheduling form, and in email, at the time, to perform a cancellation, which is their job.
When I sought out help from others in the company, my email was then blocked entirely, with a cute little message at the top of my login page that said so. And they did the same to my paypal email as well, which was attached to my account.
And, then, for a shop that involved two commutes, waiting for weeks for delivery, revealing my personal identity information, taking countless photos and combining PDFs, editing resolutions, you name it- they claimed data was missing and asked for a reply through the blocked email.
As alluded to above, when I emailed their President and Public Relations person, I had to research their contacts and use another separate email before they tried to cover up everything by releasing my block in their system for both the Paypal and contractor email address. It was then that they responded via C.B. with only half of that data, lying blatantly, as they had before, now with the top of their company implying approval.
Non payment for an evaluation is even more detrimental to an independent contractor as they are not paying you by the hour; there will be countless hours performed for an evaluation as well as gas expenditures, unless you start counting them. And as the review that they successfully removed from BBB stated, they overcomplicated the form, in her case, to the point of failure.
You must command your time, cancellations, and get paid for your work, or you are losing money from multiple ends.
Overall, what you will find is that you are largely underpaid. So when schedulers start nitpicking and attempting to control you and your time by pigeonholing you into underpaid, high labor jobs, as they did here, you owe it to yourself to say no.
Alternatives to Mystery Shopping Companies That Do Not Pay:
These days, more than ever, the government is not easier on people just because others choose to cheat them out of a living wage. Simply by not earning enough, they have ways to say you were never self-employed (an independent contractor, which they require you to claim as your title) at all in certain states and their own evaluations. Also remember that your taxes will be HIGHER than any other type of worker, whether or not you are poverty level earnings. And just say no to ATH, APC Consulting.