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Surveys And Paid Offers

Updated on May 7, 2010

Surveys And Paid Offers Revealed

I've already posted about these so called survey sites that are really paid offers sites but disguise themselves as survey sites. I wanted to get a little more indepth.They are not true survey sites even though they do have survey's on their site. Their main revenue is brought in by people signing up for the offers. When people sign up for their offers(which by the way you cannot cancel if you want to get the reward) the advertiser pays them money. In turn they pay you money when you sign up. But in my book this is not a legitimate way to make money therefore has been labeled a scam by many if not most websites and forums online. For the most part that is what it is. Sure you can make money with the offers if you give your good hard earned money to the offers/advertisers. They in turn take you credit card information down so they can bill you each and every month. I've read many complaints online of not being able to get in touch with a live person to cancel the subscription if the person should decide not to keep the product or service. This is an on going complaint for just about every advertiser. I've certianly had the problem. See something online you might want to try out only to find out three weeks down the road when you don't want the product/service anymore that you can't get in touch with anyone to cancel it so the billing continues every month unless you do it the only way you can which is to cancel the card. And sometimes I've had the billing just continue to the next credit account. This however doesn't occur on a debit card but many people are loathe to give that online as it is far more dangerous when someone could get access to your checking account. To avoid this problem I simply don't buy anything online unless it's something I absolutely want and can't get it offline at a retail store. I used to be a big online shopper until I had too many problems with charges showing up that I didn't make and find out it's some advertiser with my account information billign me for something I didn't ask for and don't want. Then I can't cancel because I can't get in touch with anyone to do so. It's very frustrating and can be quite time consuming in a fast paced world that has no time for this kind of hold ups. And this is exactly what advertiser are hoping for, that on this day you will have to put it on the backburner for cancellation and they can bill you for one more month of service for something you aren't using and you can't dispute it with your bank or credit card company because you initially asked for the advertiser to bill you and even if you didn't good luck proving to the bank you didn't. I've been through it. You often have to end up losing some of your hard earned money to a greedy advertiser that hjas it already set up in their backend to make it look like you wanted their product or service.

If you do manage to get in touch with someone to cancel be prepared to wait on the phone for at least 45 minutes and it taking up to two hours to get the whole thing cancelled and finalized because they will transfer you around several times which is another ploy they use in hopes you will run out of time or get impatient and hang up which might put another payment in their pocket. This isn't just about these paid offer sites this goes for any advertiser anywhere where you can sign up for their services/products online and some offline too.

One more thing to remember: Anywhere you are asked for your email address whether it be at an online retailer/advertiser or an offline retailer your email address is used to often times flood your inbox with junk email. And to make money by selling your information to other companies. In the end your personal information can end up in the hands of thousands of advertisers and on the lists of hundreds more of spam mailers.

I've signed up for a few of these survey/paid offer sites just to check them out and see what they are about and what they offer(not using my main email address of course, I got a free one to use that I can discard when I'm done). My opinion is they are a waste of time. Nevertheless I signed up for several just to see if you actually can make money. My inbox was flooded with so much crap I couldn't tell if there were legitimate surveys waiting or not. The best option if you want to try any out are to go the survey company's website directly and log on from there.

I'm going over some of these supposedly make money from home with survey companies or whatever search term they put them under. I've found a number of survey companies through another site I found which I like a dummy paid for the information. But there are alot of survey companies included in their index and I can't possibly try them all out at least not now. Maybe in the future I can get around to some of them and say what I thought of them.
Many of the companies included in their index were not true survey companies(yes some of them offer surveys but they are not a true survey company). Many are paid offers site like most of the ones you'll find on these lists that you pay for and claim they only have legitimate survey companies. Well, let me first outline what a true survey company is, they DO NOT have offers on their site, they only have surveys, that's it. You won't find any offers.
That's my first complaint about a site that says its a survey site yet it has offers you must sign up for to make any money and you must give them your credit card number so the advertiser can bill you every month. If you want what they are offering that's great then signing up for it and getting some of the money back is great but if you don't want what the advertiser is pushing and let's face it our entire society is made up of advertisements. Every advertiser out there is trying to get his product into the hands of toddlers before they even know what buying is about or that these things cost money. Advertisers know exactly who to target and they push hard to target the people they think will buy their product. Unfortunately, they've come with a very sneaky way of getting people to buy their products which in my opinion is unethical but practically every one out there needs money and if they don't they want more(in advertisers case).

Even if you want what the advertiser is peddling at first glance if you decide later you don't want it you are stuck with the monthly billing that can often be a big hassle to cancel. When you call the rep tries every way he/she can think of to get you to keep the product or service and you often have to wait on the phone for long periods of time to cancel making it difficult for some to actually cancel which for the advertiser is good news. They get one more month of your money which you then have to try and get back. Most of the time you can't.
And let me offer up a little advice, if you do decide you want one of these offers(whether getting money for it or something that looks interesting) never, ever use your debit card. These are the worst to get your money back if the advertiser keeps billing even if you tell them not to. You go to the bank, you tell them the truth, they say call the advertiser(which is waste of time, they aren't going to refund your money, they kept billing), you lie to the bank in an effort to get your money back and they tell you more than likely you won't get your money back and you must file a police report(they aren't going to investigate it even if it were legitimate fraud). Either way you're pretty much screwed out of your money.
If you sign up for offers always use a credit card but be diligent. If you sign up too much and have to dispute too many with the credit card issuer they will get tired of it and may block your card every time you try to use it online or at many offline sites. I had one(I will not name) that blocked my card every time I went to Wendy's or Pizza Hut. What a hassel that was. One other note, some credit card issuers will transfer the monthly billing to the new account.
As you can see I'm not a big fan of paid offer sites and that's what many of the ones that are listed as survey sites are. That's not to say you can't make any money from these sites because you can. You just have to put work into it, alot of work. It will take up alot of your time. It all depends on how much time you have and how much you devote to it. If you have very little time to spend at it and/or don't like spending excessive amounts of time on the internet(like me) then you probably won't find it worthwhile. BUt if you have some extra time and desperately need some extra money then some of these survey sites could be worth looking into and even trying to earn some money with them. The key is to find ones that offer actual surveys although you may have to go through several questionaires before finding one you qualify for. In my opinion it is basically a waste of time. I didn't qualify for any and I wasted alot of time.
I've signed up for a number of survey and paid offer sites(the ones that offer surveys) and haven't gotten a good feel for most of them.

I don't particularly recommend any survey sites but it's up to you if you want to spend a great deal of time at it.

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