When will people ever learn? I received a comment on a not very flattering post calling out oDesk Customer Service on my other blog. The comment of course did land in my spam folder as it was riddled with links. Richard, Richard, Richard…before you spam websites with your comments you might want to make sure that you are not running the risk of getting called out as a con artist peddling some sort of bogus program.
Without showing you the entire stupid comment, I’ll just show you the beginning of it so you can see what I was seeing: “If you want to make $20-$50/hour and up to $3500/month of your time working at home part-time then this is the most important message you’re ever going to read…” Cool in 70 hours a month (that’s just about 2 weeks), I can earn that much money? Show me the way! (head slap).
Of course as most of you know by now I cannot resist going to these sites to see what phony program they are promoting and of course, this was not any different than most. Except you want to talk about morons. I have to admit that while I am not a grammar or punctuation cop, I do definitely look for blatant misspelled words. But this was worse than most….get a load of this puppy: I have a ton of faith in a work-at-home opportunity that cannot spell business correctly. Go figure.
But the point is that his “opportunity reviews” are full of scummy offers too. The first post is about a site that pays you for surveys. The site claims to belong to Jay Stiver. When I checked his photo in Tineye it’s on about 25 other sites (half of them are non-English sites) and he’s everything from an Affiliate Marketing Guru to a stock market trader; of course there’s something else too that we typically call a con artist . So I’m here to call out the immediate lie that I see on the site, namely “This is the only legit survey site online, so if you are interested in making hundreds per day just giving your opinions then make sure you check this out.“.
Seriously? You knew I would have to check this out right? So off I go to the site that promises me all these wonderful things and hundreds of dollars daily (while I am swallowing my skepticism)….and as I read down their site I’m intrigued until I get to this spot:
“That is why SurveysPaid.com is so special, we have direct relationships with hundreds of the top research companies all over the world and they’ve asked us to help find people in United States of America to start taking paid surveys right away.“
Wait a minute here, I know there are MANY legitimate survey sites and I’ve never heard of this company before….so what gives?
So I did a little more digging around and lo and behold this is what I found:
- You have to pay for information (always a good sign you’re about to be scammed)
- The wonderful earnings disclaimer (you might not make a red cent)
- The affiliate program with the handy dandy banners that are set up to
conget others to sign up
Wonderful! Only 15 positions open and thousands of victims people waiting to find legitimate opportunities.
So because I always try to balance scams out with something that is legitimate, I went scouring around and looked for someone who appears to know what they are doing. And you know what? The ONE real claim they made is that there ARE thousands of survey sites that WILL pay you money. I read a forum post recently from someone named who claimed there were FREE lists of REAL paid survey sites. In fairness he does disclose that he IS an affiliate for some of these. He claims his earnings are approximately $14k a year, and he does this only (he’s disabled).
In fairness, I’ve evaluated his site, I do not see any red flags, he is not asking for any money. He may receive residual earnings IF you register with one of the sites that he is an affiliate for but otherwise there are no outstanding bugs that I can find. He’s taken the time to evaluate various sites and assign them “star” ratings and if he has not worked with them they are unrated. But the information is there for you to decide for yourself. Since there are so many offers I have not gone through them, but watch out for the red flags (you know what they are!) and use caution when signing up. The name of the site for the free leads is Free Paid Surveys Net. THIS IS NOT an affiliate link!
