The truth is that, for every legitimate survey site you’ll find on the internet, there are just that many which are scams that are out to take your money or that get your opinion and don’t pay out anything. What should you look for in a scam operation? How can you really tell if you’re wasting your time or money on a site that doesn’t offer anything at all for your time and energy?

Any survey that promises you’ll make a ton of money doing their surveys is probably not legitimate and should be suspect. An exception is a mega-site that offers you hundreds of survey opportunities and for which you fill out actual paid surveys. Online scam operations will let you believe you’ll make a great deal of money in just a few hours of doing surveys every day. This just isn’t practical and we’ll explain why:

Survey sites (legitimate ones) need a certain demographic for their surveys, such as married women between the ages of 30-40. When you sign up for a survey, you don’t know if you’ll fit into that demographic or not. You therefore have to fill out a bunch of information about yourself, including your household information and your income level. If you don’t fit the demographics they’re looking for, then you are bumped from the survey, even after spending 5-10 minutes filling out the demographic information. You don’t get any money for just filling out your demographics and you will have wasted your time. You may do this for several surveys and an hour or so of your time until you find a survey that you fit well for and can actually take for cash or points toward cash.

The points you get often account for a small fraction of what it takes to get even $5 for taking surveys at their site. For example, one teen survey site pays $10 for 1000 points worth of work but each survey pays out only 25 to 50 points at a time. That’s a lot of surveys to fill out before you get your $10 in the mail. Other sites give you a sweepstakes entry point for a really nice prize but don’t tell you that a million people have entries in the same sweepstakes. While you may be comfortable with those odds, you shouldn’t be surprised to find out someone else has one the big prize.

Some people only go for cash surveys that pay out in cash for each and every survey you do. These are the best surveys to take as you get money deposited into your Paypal account or money in a check at the end of the month. Even so, many surveys pay only a few dollars for your opinion so you have to do a lot of surveys in order to get enough money to make it worth your time. Still, if you’re a fast typist and have connections to decent survey sites, you can actually make money and won’t get scammed.

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