Does anyone really get paid to take sruveys?

About a year ago I heard all the hype about getting paid to take online surveys and I thought this would be a nice thing to add to my daily tasks and see if it would benefit me at all money wise. Not that I was thinking I could make a living off of it but $20-$50 a month would have been nice.

I signed up for a handful of survey sites and year later…zero!

OK no big deal, I just won’t even try them anymore but there are a couple things that I think are just wrong and ridiculous.I have had a few bad experiences and wanted to share a couple of them with you.

The e-mails I would get to take surveys were nice but I think it is rigged. The reason I say this is that I have been on the computer and have gotten these invites immediately and within 1-2 minutes clicked over to take the survey. Nine times out of ten I wold get a message saying “we have enough entries for this survey lease come back to take another survey.” OK so I can understand this if I get an e-mail a few hours or days after they send it, but immediately…come on!

Next thing that I actually believe is the biggest scam is the payment thresh holds. Every survey company is different. One might be $5, most I find are $10-$20. On two different sites my points would disappear when I would be close to the thresh hold. I read the fine print and I was not even close to having my points expired.  My points for that one (Toluna) were ready to pay off. I needed 6000 points to get paid $20. I was at 5700 points, it took me a long time to get there, and out of the “blue” I went down to to under 10000 points. When I was at 5700 points I had two surveys pending which would have actually put me over the 60000 point thresh hold to get paid so it would have been over $20. Most my surveys disappeared..it was almost like I never took anything.

Of course I e-mailed customer service and this is what I said:

“I had 5700 points for the longest time and was waiting for one survey to clear that would have put me over 60000 points so I can cash in and now I have under 10000 points and I have NEVER cashed in. How does that happen?
Written on:Aug 2011″

I got this response:

Hello,
Thanks for writing to us.

In order for us to be able to track the details of the payment for this or any other project please provide us the survey number which should be displayed in the survey invitation.We have many hundreds of surveys running at any time and it is not possible to check data without knowing the survey to which you are referring.

Thank you for your understanding. Written August 2011 about 9 days after I e-mailed.

OK so I don’t know about you but is it not the point of my account to keep my surveys filed, so I sent this.

I never thought of writing down the survey numbers as they just always showed up on my profile. All I know is that I had 5700 points and 2 surveys still open or pending and now they are down. I don’t understand why I should have to keep track of that, is that not what the profile is for?

Conveniently for the company I never heard back…until today. Today is Feb 21 2012. These other e-mails are from August 2011…isn’t that awesome customer service? In the meantime I deleted my account. Here is there e-mail reply I got today…6  months later!

We have responded to your case about “points”.  The response is:

Hello,

Please accept our apologies for the delay in answering your support case. Due to some unforeseen difficulties we have not been able to promptly respond to your request.

Taken into consideration the extended response time, your inquiry originating from 2011 may have become dated in the meantime, therefore we hope that it has already been solved by now.

We apologize for the uncomfortable situation that we might have caused to you. We are really distressed over this and we rely upon your sympathy and your understanding.
We would like to take this opportunity to let you know that we greatly appreciate your input and your membership and our goal is to provide you with excellent service in order to enhance your experience .

We are looking forward to hearing from you in case your inquiry is still available.

Have a pleasant day and regards,

Thank you for contacting us.

Further information about your case is included below.  Please do not reply to this email unless you wish to reopen the case.

OK my favorite part is the last sentence directly about in bold, “Please do not reply to this email unless you wish to reopen the case.” What a bunch of jerks! Of course they don’t want my reply to how horrible their customer service is and that they won’t give me an explanation. Six months later…are you kidding me.

So in the end, I don’t do ANY surveys anymore. I have not received any offers and when I sign in on the other websites I am only $$$ below their thresh holds and of course I don’t “qualify” for their surveys either.

I am so glad that these companies can take payment from the companies that give them the surveys and keep my money and make interest off of it and never pay me or just take my points away. My little $20 may not seem like much but what if they have even as little as a thousand people with almost $20 thresh holds that never get cashed out…that some sweet cash. You know they have more then 1000 people taking surveys.

So Toluna I will never be back and I will never promote you again. In fact I will not promote any survey taking company again. Guess I will never know if there is a legit one out there and frankly I am so over it I don’t really care if there is.

Have a wonderful survey free day!