How Survey Clubs Rip You Off

Survey clubs are get-rich-quick schemes disguised as real online survey resources. That is, they claim to know the best online survey companies to sign up with, but they are really just trying to make big commissions at your expense. Here's how they do it:

1) They make you sign up for free membership to access their online survey company list. However, by giving them your personal info, you set yourself up for getting spammed. Spammers use crawler programs to scour the web for e-mail addresses and other personal info, and the ones entered in a survey club's database are prime targets. By signing up, you are making it easier for your e-mail address to be harvested.

2) Survey clubs post referral links for every single online survey company in their "Top 25" list. They obviously do so in order to earn referral bonuses. They have no interest in informing the public of the best online survey companies; they only want to pick up as many affiliate bonuses possible. One survey club called Survey Club claims that it took 260 hours to determine their "Top 25" but my guess is that they spent about half that time looking for all and only the online survey companies that have affiliate programs.

3) Survey clubs list a ton of online survey companies to make you feel like you are maximizing your earning potential. Unfortunately, these same online survey companies yield, you guessed it, referral bonuses for the survey club. The more survey companies they list, even if half of them are paltry, the more money they make on sign-ups. Never mind that the member won't make any actual money--he/she signed up, so the survey club is happy.

4) Survey clubs have affiliate ties to shady third-party companies, the ones who flood your e-mail inbox with dreams of enhanced virility or millions of dollars with no hard work. At the time of this writing, there was an ad at Survey Club for referral-ware software that you had to qualify to use. How do you qualify? By giving the company your personal information, that's how. At another time, they had an ad for a secret shopper program. Survey clubs get kickbacks from their scammers-in-arms, again, with no regard to your financial well-being. Survey Club is not the only one who does this. All survey clubs work pretty much the same way: clutter a page full of online survey companies that yield affiliate bonuses whether or not they pay the panelist, link to other internet thieves who make their scam operation sound exclusive, and collect personal info for e-mail crawler programs to harvest. It's all a scam.