Fraud Prevention Unit by REGIONAL federal credit union

You see the advertisements all the time. Bigspot.com: earn money for taking online surveys. Of course, it sounds like every other get-rich-quick scheme on TV, at least until you start to look closely.

You see, these ads are a little different. For one thing, they run during primetime, rather than only late at night and during daytime television. For another, if you visit their website, it contains the following text:

Will I Get Rich?

No, silly. You’re not going to get rich taking surveys. You’ll have the opportunity to put some extra cash in your pocket each month and the chance to earn some really great rewards.

Whoa. That actually sounds…honest. Maybe this thing isn’t so bad after all.

I did a few hours’ worth of research on the Internet. I found people who had tried it and not made a dime, and people who reported having snagged $50 or so. There were plenty of people dismissing it as a scam without having even looked at it, and a ton of people asking whether or not it was real. I found no mention of class-action lawsuits or official investigations taking place.

So I devised an experiment; I was going to find out for you.

I had an article written and scheduled to appear this morning about how I was going to create a new email address (just in case it turned into a spamalanche), sign up at Bigspot.com and always answer every question honestly (unlike professional focus group participants, who tend to lie a lot just to be included in as many groups as possible). I was going to take at least one survey per day for 30 days, then report back whether I had made anything or not.

Here’s the short version of the story: I’ve already aborted the experiment and deleted my original article. I have no conclusive results as to the legitimacy of Bigspot.

Here’s the long version: I created a new email address and signed up at the website. I wasn’t being asked for any detailed personal information, so I was okay with it so far. There were a couple confusing screens asking me to sign up for something or other. I checked only one of those, since I wasn’t really clear as to what it was.

I quickly began to see how the site works. You sign up for Bigspot, which simply directs you to other websites that do surveys. I managed to take one survey, which amounted to a bunch of incredibly vague questions about music. It was a fake survey—real ones usually go into much more detail. It awarded me 25 “points.”

Points? I don’t want points. I want cash!

After this, I ended up at another site with a “chance to win up to 5,000 points for great rewards” or something. An animated “game” played out on the screen, and I got 30 more points. At this point, I was taken to another screen where I was asked once again to create a username, password, and fill in some other information.

I didn’t do it. At this point, I honestly became completely skeeved out by the whole process. I was going to have to create an “account” at the website of every single survey I took! Maybe most of these sites would, at worst, sell my email address to spammers, but what if they had other plans?

Here’s the thing: I don’t think Bigspot “vouches” for any of the sites they send you to, and I have heard that some of those other ”market research” companies are in fact involved in some less-than-legit activities. Heck, maybe they’re the ones who sent me the “Canadian Pharmacy” email a few days ago, I don’t know.

At any rate, here are the only things I can tell you about my Bigspot.com experiment:

1. I can’t say it doesn’t work, but I can tell you you’ll have to jump through a million hoops before you obtain a cash payment of any kind. There are far easier ways to make a quick buck. A garage sale would be less of a hassle.
2. I’m still going to watch that “dummy” email account I created. I only gave that address to two websites (Bigspot and the other site), so let’s see if it turns into a Spam Dump over the next couple months.

So, I’ll have to choose a different target for an “investigative journalism” type of post in the future. I could just video myself calling up phishers and lottery scammers and messing with them. It wouldn’t teach anybody anything, but it might be entertaining.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 30th, 2009 at 12:01 am and is filed under Scams on Television, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.