Moneymaking scams - part 4

This series is devoted to exposing online moneymaking scams. This is the fourth installment of the 17 types of rip-offs that will be listed here. To see previous installments scroll down the page or use the links on the right.

Paid Survey Sites

Since these are related to the Paid-to-Read email type scams I thought I'd keep these together. Instead of getting paid to read e-mails, you get paid to take online surveys.

In a nutshell this is how they work. You register with the company. This can either be free but most likely at a cost, some as high as $70. The company then send you links to take online surveys. As with the Paid-to-Read e-mail scams, they promise very high pay for simple surveys. They are lying just like the Paid-to-Read e-mail companies.

First, you have to qualify to be able to take the surveys. Qualification is hard. Sometimes you have to be in a very small group. Think about it as a business owner that wants a survey for market study, if it was easy to find people to take your survey why on earth wouldn't you just set up the survey yourself rather than farm it out to these guys? You could put a survey up on your site or those sites that you do business with and even offer and incentive, like coupons, free merchandise, or gift certificates, to get people to participate.

No, they hire these guys to get people like you to take the surveys because they are looking for particular people to take these surveys and those people are hard to find. But wait... even if you do qualify what happened to the large cash pay-outs for these surveys? You get excited that you have qualified for a survey only to find out that this particular survey only pays ten cents (about the average in my experience). So you'll have to take a hundred surveys to get $10.

Figure the average time to take the survey at 10 minutes and you are making a whopping $0.60 an hour! Wow! I say no thanks and you should too! The only reason that these are still around is that people (like me) still fall for this scam for the same reasons they fall for the Paid-to-Read e-mail scam, it sounds just to easy! These guys make their money up front with your account setup fee and they do real well by the way.

I'm sure you've seen these, and, by the way, the reason you see these all the time is because they usually have pretty good affiliate programs. This means you can sign up as an affiliate and make money by getting other people to fall for this scam. Some people make a good living just of the affiliate programs on these things. Do me a favor, don't fall for these, and whatever you do, don't even think about promoting them. That would make you no better than them and karma will catch up with you! You have been warned! :)

For real honest moneymaking opportunities click here.

Until next time, to your success!
Ken