What To Watch Out For Taking Paid Surveys

Anyone who works at home is perceived as an easy target for fraud, since there is no traditional physical documentation of time spent or work completed (like punching a time clock or attending meetings with other employees, for instance), and no overseeing labor agency to hear employee complaints. Thus, people who take surveys in exchange for money have to be particularly vigilant in defending themselves against the myriad of schemes afoot to extract work without paying for it.

Simple Things to Avoid in Paid Surveys

As has been mentioned before, you must try to avoid any waste of time in your online work, including answering questions you're not paid to answer or taking surveys and being "screened-out" before you complete them.

Note: Some survey offers insist some of the sweepstakes-entry surveys are what's called "pre-screening," and if you fit the required demographic you'll then be asked to take a paid survey or product test. There's no independent verification of that possibility though, meaning you will have to test this theory yourself on different sites as part of your campaign to find the sites that yield the highest earnings for you.

You should also avoid any sites that make you click through advertising that tries to sell you merchandise, because no one will ever pay you for patiently clicking to turn down each of those unsolicited ads.

Don't Confuse Surveys and Offers

It is easy to confuse survey sites with what are called "offer sites," meaning companies that ask you to sign up for some product and promise to pay you for doing so. What happens in that case, is you're the one who ends up paying more, of course.

Usually it is because you have just committed your credit card or bank account information (which you should never, ever do in an effort to earn money) to a payment of, say, $30 for a club membership you do not want and will not use in order to earn $4 from the offer site. Or you inadvertently sign up for another unwanted credit card, and the site (which will make money for referring you to the card company) promises you a small check in six weeks for doing that.

Heed the Warnings Signs: Never Pay to Play

If what you think is a survey site ever asks for financial information or a payment of any kind, including payment for a list of other sites "guaranteed to earn top dollar" or even payment to register with the site, that means you should drop that site immediately and close out the e-mail account you set up for communicating with it.

A variant on that scam is worked by sites that say you'll be paid for signing-up for free trials in order to test a product. You may not remember to cancel the trials before you're charged, and some companies deliberately set the period you are required to test the product so it lasts longer than the free trial itself, so you end up being forced to pay.

These things will not happen to you of course, because you know you should never give out any means of payment in such a situation. There are perfectly legitimate product tests out there, and for those tests you should never pay shipping charges for the product.

If anyone asks you to do pay, remember the rule: you do not pay your employer, it's always the other way around.

More Warning Signs

Once you have booked a number of completed surveys, disreputable sites have found many different ways to avoid paying you for your work.

Some vanish without a trace.
Some deny requests to redeem points for cash because of some problem with the personal information you provided that the company suddenly discovers after you've done the work, but before they've paid you.
There are sites from which you never do collect all your money, because they will not pay cash without charging you a transaction fee, or will not pay until you collect a certain amount, or will not let you withdraw anything other than a large dollar amount (they will always owe you money).
Sometimes a site will stop sending you surveys when you near a cash-out amount, which is another good reason to avoid the sites with high amounts required for withdrawal.

Keep Accurate Records to Avoid the Bad Guys

It is your responsibility to keep accurate records of every transaction you perform with a site, because that will serve two purposes.

First, you will be able to review your records and see immediately which sites have wasted your time and which have paid off fairly.
Second, you will be able to avoid the next trap, presented by sites that don't give you credit for all your surveys, or want to pay you a lower amount than the one promised, or consistently blank out in the middle of long surveys without providing a link to restart where you left off, or fail to give you enough information to keep an accurate accounting of the surveys you've taken.

Reliable survey sites should let you know approximately how much time a proposed survey will take to complete, exactly how much it will pay you, and show you a unique number for each survey that you can use to keep track of how much the company owes you. That number is what you send to customer service if one of your surveys is ever interrupted by transmission problems, so you can begin again where you left off.

Companies that will not give you that information are sending a signal they do not want you to know exactly how much they owe you, and they're hoping you will simply take their word for it that what they show as your account information is true and complete.

Do not ever depend on someone else to tell you how much work you have done, because you will lose money in the process.

Other tactics some dubious sites use to delay or deny payment are these: promising you a check, but only after a long period of time (45 days, for example), or promising a shorter turnaround time for checks but failing to deliver. Problems like those are frequently found in conjunction with absent customer service, in which it's impossible to contact the company or the company ignores your messages. In that case, you will be very glad you followed the advice above not to work with sites that require a large cash amount, because you will find it much easier to walk away from the $5 the company will never give you than you would if the amount were greater.