Paid surveys have become increasingly common with many sites offering money in return for your time in taking their online surveys.
Most paid surveys appear to be scams. Some of these online surveys are legitimate. However, the legitimate surveys pay out very small amounts of cash for a lot of work. If you’re short of cash, there’s better ways of earning money without investing so much of your time.
These scam surveys will tend to ask generic questions. The purpose of legitimate online surveys is to obtain specific demographic information that’s useful for advertisers who market to the public.
Often you must make a certain amount before you can withdraw the cash, so it can take awhile before you discover it’s a scam. By that time, you’ve already invested a lot of time and effort in carrying out the surveys and they’ve got your email address and personally information.
One such scam is Start Survey, which promises to pay out $14 for each survey you take. It only takes about two minutes to complete each survey and less than ten minutes per day. This is supposed to make you $42 Plus more if you sign up friends and family. You can take three surveys every day, which adds up to $42. You can then earn additional cash by referring friends to the site – $15 per sign up, plus 20% of what your referrals earn. If you have a lot of online friends this can add up to a descent amount of money for online work.
If only it was true:
While signing up to Start Survey or up-Survey is easy – you must give them your Paypal or Payza email address and a password. If you must sign up don’t give them any password you would normally use for PayPal or any other site!
Up-survey is similar in that it is supposedly easy to earn money, however you never get paid even after you’ve reached the threshold of earnings necessary to withdraw the money.
These are just scams to collect your email address – which are then added to a spam database. If they ask you for a password it’s common for people to use the same password for everything. In which case they have both your Paypal ID and your password!
Don’t bother with paid surveys. Most are a scam and the ones that are legitimate pay very little.
If you have an experience to share regarding online surveys please share in the comments below.