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Super Rewards: Making the Best of a Terrible, Awful System
Super Rewards is a company that monetizes Facebook and Myspace applications (apps). “Monetize”, as in: it allows the people who make Facebook and Myspace apps to make money off of their hard work. Normally this would be a good thing. Application developers would be paid, so they can spend more time making their apps better, to earn more money, to make their apps better, etc. This should have been a prime example of how the free market system should work. The problem is that Super Rewards is, in fact, aiding scam artists. But… I’m getting ahead of myself.
How the system is supposed to work is pretty simple. If you give money to Super Rewards, they will give money to the developers of the apps (and then the developers of the apps will give you something in game called something similar to “Favor Points”). This way you don’t have to trust your personal information with possibly shady apps. However, if you do not want to pay cash for your “Favor Points” (let’s face it, most of us do this for the “Favor Points” or whatever they’re called for each app), you can take part in “Special Offers”. These special offers can be anything from downloading a toolbar, to filling out surveys, to signing up for Netflix.
While paying cash directly is easy and doesn’t cause any problems, taking part of “Special Offers” is what makes Super Rewards a terrible, awful system. There are two kinds of Special Offers, ones that you pay money for (for some goods or services), and ones that are “Free”. Please note: EVEN FREE OFFERS HAVE THEIR PRICE! All “Free” offers usually involve you downloading a program, or filling out a survey. All programs that are available to download contain spyware, adware, and/or viruses. All surveys require you to insert personal information (which will be used to send you spam), or require a cell phone number. If you do a survey that requires a cell phone number, be sure to check your next bill, there’s a very high chance that the survey will add a monthly charge on there, making your free “Favor Points” cost you an arm and a leg!
To add insult to injury, once you have completed a special offer, there is an absurdly high chance that there will be a problem in the credit process, cause you to not get your “Favor Points” and the developers of the app in question will not get their money. And when I say “Absurdly high”, I mean to say that out of the last 100 special offers I have completed, 4 went through without any problems. That’s a 1/25 chance that things will work like they are supposed to, and a 24/25 chance that the offer won’t amount to anything. Yeah. That’s something.
So, what do you do? You want to support the developers of your favor apps (and be rewarded for it), but if you don’t have any money, how do you do it? I’ll tell you.
First of all, do not do any offers that aren’t “free”. While they will offer you more “Favor Points”, it’s a lot of hassle, and a greater chance that you won’t get your favor points in the end.
For the “free” offers, do not fill out any surveys. Email/regular mail spam is never worth it, and hidden cell phone fees are a laugh and a half. Just stay away from them.
The ones you can trust are the ones that will blatantly add spyware, adware, and viruses to your computer.
I know, but hear me out.
These are the kinds of offers that say that if you download and install a program or toolbar, you’ll get a small amount of “Favor Points”. However, if you install the program/toolbar with Sandboxie, then you can quickly, and easily, remove all of the crap you installed on your computer with ease. This way, you really did download and install whatever they wanted, and you can get your “Favor Points” without the spyware, adware, and viruses.
But before you completely remove the program/toolbar from your computer, be sure to take a screenshot of the program on your computer. PC users can do this with the “Print Screen” button on your keyboard (it might be abbreviated to “prnt scrn” or something similar). After pushing the “Print Screen” button, open up any kind of Paint program, and paste the screenshot into the paint program (pushing control and “v” will do this easily). To take a screenshot on a MAC is a little more difficult. I recently found out how to do it by reading this guide. Since I don’t want to plagiarize him, please read his article to find out how to take a screenshot on a MAC.
Once you have taken a screenshot of the program/toolbar on your computer, you can then delete the program/toolbar from your computer with Sandboxie. Once you have done this, wait awhile. Most offers say they take 15 minutes before they finish the crediting process and give you your “Favor Points”, but I would wait until the next day before you check to see if you got your “Favor Points”.
When you check for your “Favor Points”, you’ll probably see that the offer did not go through. Don’t worry, hope is not lost. At this point, you’ll need to go to the Super Reward’s customer service page (Facebook’s version of this page can be found here). Calmly send them a note saying that you did not get your “Favor Points”. Be sure to send them that screenshot that you took, to prove that the program was on your computer. While most of the offers from Super Rewards are scams, the Super Rewards customer service is user-friendly. They know that most of their offers don’t work the way that they’re supposed to. If you send them a screenshot with the program/toolbar on your computer, they’ll give you your “Favor Points” without hassle.
And that’s it. If you follow these instructions, you can get your in-game rewards and give the developers of your favorite apps something for their trouble. Remember, it’s easier and the application developers make more money if you just give them money outright, but if you can’t afford it, this is a nice alternative, without getting spammed, getting scammed, or seriously *messing* up your computer.