North Texas is becoming a target for sophisticated international fraud rings which use cashier's checks to steal money from consumers. The scam uses legitimate businesses to gain victims’ confidence.

Don Edinburgh might have been one of them, had he not been a little less skeptical.

Last week, he received a cashiers’ check for $2,875 in an overnight letter delivered to his home. He wasn’t ready to believe the check was real. “When I got a cashier's check in an uninsured envelope,” he says, “I became very suspicious.” The check now appears to be the last chapter in a plot to get his money.

It all started with a classified ad in the Dallas Morning News soliciting part and fulltime workers to work at home. He responded to the ad and faxed back a completed application. A day later an overnight letter was delivered by Purolator Courier, notifying him that he’d be employed by CRG Mystery Shoppers. He’d be going to Wal-Mart, the letter said, to test their “Moneygram” service as a secret shopper.

“I was to pretend to be a consumer going into a Wal-Mart to purchase a moneygram,” he says. The goal was to test how helpful and efficient the Wal-Mart clerks are. He was instructed to deposit the cashier's check in his personal account, send most of it to a third party, and keep $200 for himself.

“Most of that money would have gone to a crook,” says Jay Newman of the Dallas Better Business Bureau. After depositing the checks in their own banks, and using their own checking accounts to forward the money, the BBB says the original cashier's checks then bounce, leaving the “mystery shopper” in the lurch.

The BBB says there are 19 fictitious companies using north Texas addresses for cashier's check schemes. Many use phone numbers that are nearly impossible to trace to a location.

The schemes may last 30 to 45 days and then they may run on to another company or they scam another firm.

Toronto is the purported address of the company that sent Edinburgh his check. The Purolator overnight letter has a return address tracing to a law firm called Morris and Morris in Toronto. But the firm knows nothing about it. Brian Morris says his firm received a bill for more than a dozen overnight letters from Purolator which it never sent nor authorized.

Wal-Mart, meanwhile, says it does not use “mystery shoppers.”

And in Dallas, Don Edinburgh is getting frequent phone calls from a man asking when he’s going to deposit the cashier's check. He’s not returning the calls.

Earlier this year, authorities in Toronto arrested two people in a bogus international cashier's check scheme. Most of the attempted crimes have a Canadian connection. Morris and Morris says the checks are being sent across the United States.

The clear lesson of all this: beware of unsolicited cashier's checks from north of the border.

E-mail bharris@wfaa.com.