focus groups and mock juries

[darkoshi]

Got a message on my answering machine with a guy's voice saying they need people for a one-day "focus group" which pays $250, with breakfast and lunch provided. It didn't even sound like a recording, though it probably was. He left a phone number for calling him back.

I've never gotten a message quite like that before, and couldn't tell if it was a scam. Focus Group? What could that be, and why would they pay that much money for it? I've got a job, so I'm not interested, but maybe my mom or niece would be.

So I looked online, and found a Craigslist ad for the same thing. It links to nelsonrecruiting dot com, which seems like a legitimate company for that kind of thing.

While looking up about focus groups, I came across the term "mock jury". I hadn't heard of that before either, so I looked it up. Apparently, if you're rich, not only can you hire a good lawyer to defend you, but your lawyers can hire people to act as mock juries, to find out which arguments are most likely to help them win their case. Sigh.

Comments

[darkoshi]

That is quite a coincidence. I'm not sure if that makes it seem more legitimate, or more likely to be a scam.

Yours is from the same company, nelsonrecruiting? Their website says they've been in business for 32 years, but the internet archive doesn't have any history for their site, based on their robots.txt. Their whois info seems to indicate the domain has been around since at least 2010, if I'm interpreting it right.