Are Paid Surveys a Scam
A rose by any other name is still a rose, and a "paid survey" by any other name is still a scam. Seriously, you have as much chance of REALLY finding money growing on trees as you do in finding money from a paid survey site in your Paypal account.
I know. I've tested it. I've gone on the real, real, real sites everyone touts. People assure you you will make money once you complete the survey. The problem is, you RARELY can complete the survey. The sites I tested refer you to an extra 20 places that you don't recognize. You think you are filling out info for that first site, when, in fact, you've been diverted elsewhere right after the first screen.
Part of my job is testing out theories before I put them in public on paper. I'm a journalist. We live to figure out this sort of thing.
So, I did my job. What I found is-it's a lie, and a thinly veiled one at that. To those who scream to the ends of the earth that they do, indeed, make money filling out simple paid surveys: I want to see your bank statements from places that DON'T require that you rope your friends and families into this crap in order to make money. That's another one of the catches folks. Referrals. Most of the people who swear to earning a great living with paid surveys do so to entice you to click on the link they provide. Bingo, they've just cashed in on you as a referral. Ca-ching. Now, if you don't mind duping your friends, family and strangers, well...you can make money "filling out surveys." One woman I've read about, highly successful in this field, has admitted that 90 percent of her income comes from referrals, not the actual work.
I've been on the private and public end of the field (many years ago), but we never paid more than the token $1 when someone filled out a survey. Why? It TAINTS the survey.
So the results aren't worth much. So, what these people are paying for is your address and for you to sign up for the incentives over and over for the hope of maybe, maybe getting on that list that will give you the work at home job that requires no brains. Even if you get something, or entered into that contest, the company is making more doing it this way than by buying mailing lists. In other words, WHY BUY THE COW! You, my friend, are the cow.
Most of this crap has nothing to do with a survey. I just got one in the mail from one of those 25 places that spawned the next 25. This was to get FREE paper towels. The SURVEY had to do with 6 pages of "sign up for these things, too." And that has to do with PAPER TOWELS, how? Of course, the first 2 pages were all your choice, sign up or not, then page 3 hit you with the little item that you HAD to SIGN up for one of these programs in order to get the FREE PAPER TOWELS. So the two pages worth of names and address info I gave out were for naught if I stopped there, right? It had to end soon, right? No. I got to 6, and I was pretty sure it would never end.
One night I started doing one of the ones that give out $25 cards for Home Depot or the like. Now, if these people got me to page 6 for FREE paper towels for my SURVEY, an you imagine what they wanted from me to get a gift card? I put 2 hours into it. I signed up for my trial magazines, trial netflix, trial blockbuster, yada, yada. Then, TWO HOURS later, I had to make a choice to ACCEPT two of the four FINAL offers. Now I had seen the word final many times in this survey, so I closed up shop when the the final choices were something like putting a new roof on my house and home extermination.
It sounds like a good Tonight Show joke, but it's the truth so it's not so funny: Can you make money taking surveys? Ummm...I don't know. I've never gotten to the end of one yet.
