The Potential Detritus Of Online Surveys

Patti writes:

I was planning to try working at home doing “paid surveys” online. They are asking me to install several programs that I don’t know anything about. Is it safe?

The Internet has opened up many options for those that want to work from home, but the reality is that there are more scam artists than legitimate operations when it comes to real opportunities.

The overwhelming majority of Web sites that claim that you can make big
money just for simply filling our surveys are not quite telling you the
whole story.

In fact, most of them will simply put you on a mailing list of Web sites
that are claiming to give random prizes away for participating in the
surveys or a ‘chance’ at making some large hourly rate.

Any site that is asking you to install ’special software’ in order to
participate in a paid survey system sounds suspicious to me. I would also
avoid any site that wants you to pay a small ‘fee’ in order to get the
information you need to make the ‘big money.’

You will most likely be out whatever you paid and even worse, you will be
labeled as a ’sucker’ and passed on to other scam companies so that they can
prey on you.

Not only do you stand the risk of divulging your personal contact
information to thousands of marketing companies, you will likely end up
installing an adware or spyware program in addition that will track your
every move and send you pop-ups, not to mention potential computer
problems.

If you do a little research on the Internet about paid survey sites (look in
forums), you will see lots of people that have had very poor experiences
with many of the sites, especially the ones that claim that you can make big
money.

The more likely outcome of your involvement with these types of sites is
that you will spend a lot of time giving them lots of information about you
and get small rewards (if any) in return.

Your marketing profile and contact information is actually what they are
trying to get from you so that they can go to large marketing firms and sell
access to you on a targeted basis.

For instance, if the survey is about cars, one of the most likely questions
that you will be asked is if you plan to make a purchase in the next 6
months. For all those that answer yes, the marketing company can sell
access to you (generally via e-mail, which you have already pre-approved
because you signed up for the surveys) to the various car companies that
would like to pitch a car deal to you.

This whole ‘make big money on the Internet’ routine falls squarely into the
classic ‘if it sounds too good to be true, it usually is’ box. Whatever you
do, don’t expect to make a living on paid survey sites.

It’s not that every online survey company or opportunity to make money on
the Internet is a scam; it just isn’t that easy to separate the legitimate
companies from the shams, so be very cautious!