The Paid Survey Scam- The Truth Revealed!

I'd go to a site to sign up, spend two hours filling out questions about my preferences... with no indication of how far I'd gotten in the process--and when I tried to close out of the screen, ten more popups would jump out at me.  I finally had to press the "off" button on my computer, because I  could not escape the popups.

At the same time, I had to give my phone number to sign up to take surveys, and within minutes, I found myself flooded with phone calls from rabid telemarketers.  This has taken weeks to undo, and has almost resulted in my needing to change my number.

The surveys took three dead-end forms:

Scenario1: Get an offer to take a survey, but in order to get paid, you must sign up for a trial membership, and give all your personal information including credit card.  They tell you that you can cancel at any time, but if you multiply this scenario times 150, it's going to add up to a lot of extra work -- not to mention the possibility of missing some, and thus getting charged in full. Can you imagine what charging and canceling on your card 150 times  would look like?!

Here's an example of a survey offer I got recently- I've removed the names so I don't get in trouble:

 A Survey is considered completed once you fill out this survey and Signup For a Offer from Advertiser.

Name Offer

To be eligible for the payout you need to follow the following steps

1) Complete this survey

2) Sign up for ABC Advertiser

3) Get paid $16 automatically in your XYZ Reserarch account!!

4) Note: You can cancel at anytime, you will still be compensated with $16 for this survey.

To Continue, please press the button below.

Here you get the offer of $16 to take the survey and sign up for the trial membership...which is $9 per month, or $99 yearly.  This leaves  you with a possible net gain of $6- but only for a month, or a net loss of $83!  How is that earning a living?

Scenario 2: You take a long survey, answer honestly, and at the end, find there is no monetary payment, but you HAVE been entered in a sweepstakes!  

Super!  That'll pay the mortgage.

Or they just offer to take a bunch of your time for entry in the sweepstakes...

•     Reward: An entry in our current sweepstakes
•     Time: 30 minutes (approx)
•      Survey Number: 1001802a
  

Scenario 3:  Get an email offering you $25 to take a survey, so you bite.  They begin by asking you a few "qualifying" questions, and after three or four, tell you that you do not meet their criteria for the survey. This happened dozens of times before I completely gave up, and decided to find something better.

In the end I never made a penny taking surveys.

Perhaps there are survey sites that work for people I don't know. If there are,  perhaps they are linked to sites more "Legit" than this site.  However, my experience with "paid surveys" cost me a significant amount of time, a now continuous stream of SPAM that beats even my strongest filter, and, more importantly, my privacy

Upon going back to review the offers LegitOnlineJobs presents, I find that there is nothing in there that an individual can't do entirely on their own for free.  You can go to Flickr, or start up your own webpage to sell photos.  You can advertise to help people with clerical work anywhere.  You can write reviews and submit them--  you can even build websites-- all without paying someone else.

And no one should have to pay in order to get paid. There are plenty of honest websites that offer real 24/7 help over the phone.

Conclusion:

"Legit" is in the eye of the beholder, but I caution everybody against this site.  There are sites designed to help the beginner.  It's not acceptable to have to fork over huge sums of money for "aggressive training."  (His reasoning was that I would pay that much for a college course, or any other kind of training-- hmmm)  And there is far more legitimate work to be done online that does not require you to freely hand out your credit card number.

Recommendation: Do Not Recommend