Paid surveys are a great thing – you answer questions, you get money for it. However, scammers tend to ruin every great thing nowadays. You can’t be too sure about paid survey websites, as a lot of them hide dirty secrets behind the scenes. Sure, there are many reputed and honest ones out there, but you have to know how to find them. This article will go over the most common signs of a scamming website, and hopefully help you avoid them and have a pleasant survey-taking experience.

The design

The most obvious thing – the design of the website. Does it look too generic? Most scammers don’t bother making a design for their websites, so they just take the first template they see. This is why you should have a sharp eye for those things – if you see some generic subtitle under the logo, it’s probably a sign of a scam. Look at the source of the webpage, there may be a trademark logo of the original designer, or something like that.

If it’s too good to be true, it probably is

If you got to the website through an ad, that’s a sign of a scam itself, but don’t take it so seriously. What you should look at, is the ad itself – does it make crazy-sounding promises, such as making thousands of dollars each day, or something similar? That’s a sure sign of a scam. Even common sense can tell you that – if people could make so much money answering questions in front of the computer, nobody would bother working anything else! The truth is, there is money in this business, but you have to work hard for it, like everywhere else.

Check forums

Forums are a great source of information on anything, as they contain a lot of unbiased opinions. If a website is a scam, it’s probably mentioned in a lot of forums around the Internet. Take a look around, if you see the website being mentioned in a negative tone somewhere, investigate further – what was the person disappointed with? Sometimes people speak bad of a website for other reasons – they weren’t satisfied with the support, for example. Don’t be so quick to take any such information as a clean coin, look up what other people are saying. Opinions are great, but some of us tend to stretch them a bit too far – make sure you don’t fall for that trap.